I feel like an idiot for being unable to get this working...

I'm trying to put together a general purpose "project templating
engine" and I'd like to just package a directory full of project
templates that get copied and rendered in ERB on demand. These
templates often include empty directories that I can't seem to get
packaged into my gem - no matter what I do.

I'm pretty sure I'm doing something really dumb, but I can't seem to
figure out what it is!

It occurred to me that I might pack these templates up in a zip or tar
file and just unpack them on request, but I couldn't get the empty
directories into the zip file either. At this point, that makes me
think I'm just doing something wrong, so rather than going to the pack/
unpack scheme - it seems like I ought to just ask you folks how to do
it correctly.

So -

Does anyone know how to get empty directories into a gem package?

Here's what I have in my rake file:

PKG_LIST = FileList['[a-zA-Z]*',
                     'bin/**/*',
                     'lib/**/*',
                     'templates',
                     'templates/**/*',
                     'templates/**/.[a-z]*'
]

PKG_LIST.exclude('.svn')
PKG_LIST.each do |file|
  puts 'file: ' + file
  task :package => file
end

When I run "rake package", I see all of the desired files *and* all of
the desired directories on screen, but when I install the gem, they're
not there!

I'm guessing there is some simple exclude directive that I'm not able
to find? I dug around in the rake package task code, but can't see
anything obvious (to me at least)


Thanks,


lb.