On Wed, 28 Nov 2001 09:40, Steve Loughran wrote:
> >My point is why should the protocol matter? Why *shouldn't* the attribute
>
> "file" be overloaded?
because people don't think of files and urls as being synonymous? ;)
> 1. it aint a file, it is a URL. I know that you can argue that it is a
> remote file, but that assumes that the url endpoint is 'legacy' static
> content, not some dynamically created or retrieved thing.
or that URL actually has an endopoint. How would you copy a
"mailto:peter@apache.og" url ? ;)
While I do like the concept of urls as general resource directory I think it
needs to be done at a virtual filesystem level. Then we could query the
"file" to see whether it supports operation X (where X may be read, write,
getType, getName, canRead etc)/
> 2. The more information we provide in the XML syntax, the less
> interpretation which needs to be included in the runtime, which gives more
> flexibility in the future. Example: with a URL= syntax you could have an
> XSLT task which treated file= assignments differently from url=
> assignments.
>
> My friend Gabe, serious XML hacker, once took me aside and listed all the
> places where ant was naughty and used hid structure inside an XML literal
> instead of on the outside, which roughly comes down to wherever we used a
> list and wherever an attribute was overloaded:
> <target depends="task1,task2" >
> <exec os="windows 2000, unix" > (actually this is worse, as we just
> substring match, so "windows" would still get a hit>
> includes="...", excludes="..."
yep ;(
> Now, some things have happenened, and they are frozen in the ant 1.x
> syntax. But we dont need to make things continually worse, do we?
hope not. Especially not with the depends attribute ;)
> 3. Remember that email about how we should have consistent property names,
> srcFile and srcDir, destFile and destDir. Using srcURL and destURL would be
> consistent. Yes, I know that <copy> isnt consistent with this scheme, but
> that is a historical feature. We could make it consistent...
we should really go through and make a list of all the ones already in
existence and then try to draw something from that. I seem to recall that
copy actually moved away from that syntax for some reason.
--
Cheers,
Pete
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