At 10:07 AM 5/18/01 -0700, Alan George wrote:
>IMHO, Ant should solve this problem.
luckily your not a committer then eh?
>This kind of thing I have seen many times.
yup.
>If it's not meant to solve this problem, what value does it have.
It was initially designed to be a cross platform build process for tomcat,
nothing more. It grew into something that could build small to medium java
programs (or any extensible build processes - ala basic content generation).
Hopefully Ant2 will be capable of doing large scale builds of any sort (ie
not java specific). A pattern that emerged in make for handwritten build
files was to have at least three make files that are all included together.
1. A rules makefile
2. A data makefile
3. A config makefile
(1) coresponds to the notion of "templates"
(2) could theoretically be anything (in make I used to use the equivelent
of flat properties files) but hopefully by Ant2 it will just be
declarations of properties and datatypes plus maybe a few "actions"/"tasks".
(3) is similar to results generated by autoconf or to hand maintained
~/.ant.properties that are starting to pop up in projects.
Cheers,
Pete
*-----------------------------------------------------*
| "Faced with the choice between changing one's mind, |
| and proving that there is no need to do so - almost |
| everyone gets busy on the proof." |
| - John Kenneth Galbraith |
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