I'm a rake beginner with a couple of questions:

(1) Is there any way to set rake options from the within the Rakefile, 
as though they had been specified on the command-line?  I always want to 
run a particular Rakefile with particular options (e.g. -s).

(2) It seems rake either gives way too much info, or not enough.  I want 
Make-like behavior:  Don't bother telling me about stuff you didn't have 
to build, but do tell me when you're actually building something.

I see the potential, and I like it, but I'm starting to feel like I need 
a separate Makefile just to run rake.