At 22:34 6/11/2001 +0000, Jose Alberto Fernandez wrote:
>What kind of tasks are we talking about. Can someone explain?
My understanding is that there are a *lot* of people that have developed
"in-house" tasks for various purposes. (If my Java was a little better, I
would have done this myself instead of using antcall and exec so much.)
Since these tasks are "in-house" they aren't publicised and we *cannot*
find out about them. We can't be sure that the authors are subscribed to
any Ant mailing list or that they read the archives.
So, there are a lot of tasks out there that are absolutely vital to peoples
business (where Ant is a real build tool on a real commercial project) and
there is NO way to find and contact them all.
Also remember that most people won't read any release notes unless
something breaks.
Hence, any change to the Ant API that breaks preexisting tasks is going to
piss a lot of users off who won't know anything about the change until
their builds stop working - and these builds might just break at a critical
time on a project.
Not a good way to build customer confidence or the user base.
Please note that I'm not arguing against your suggestions - nor am I
arguing for them as I don't know enough to have a valid opinion. I just
putting the case that breakage to backward compatibility needs to occur in
places where the regular customer expects it - such as a shift from 1.8 to 2.0.
Cheers,
Bevan.
--
"Programming is an Art Form that Fights Back"
Bevan Arps (<mailto:bevan.arps@actfs.co.nz>bevan.arps@actfs.co.nz)
Senior OO Analyst, ACT Financial Systems
This communication is confidential to ACT Financial Systems (Asia
Pacific) and is intended for use only by the addressee. The views and
opinions expressed in this email are the senders own and do not
represent the views and opinions of ACT Financial Systems (Asia
Pacific).
|