Scott M Stark wrote: >I'll volunteer, but first let me ask a question about exactly what the scope of Ant >is supposed to be. Let me put this question in the context of a recent gnumake >to Ant porting effort. The one target type that I could not port to Ant without >extensive custom taskdefs was the ability to define a jar of classes target in terms of >its source dependencies. This turns out to be nontrivial because of inner classes, >rmi stubs, source generated from JavaCC grammars, etc. > >I was able define a scheme that handled all these issues using gnumake pattern >rules and its internal functions. Its complicated and fragile however. I'm not saying >Ant should or should not support this type of target at its core. I'm asking what the >scope of the core Ant functionality should be.
I'd really like to resist having "gnumake pattern rules and its internal functions" as a core part of Ant. Much the same way that I don't want JavaScript or Perl to be part of the core. But I would have no problem with a taskdef that implemented or interfaced to an external language. Such a task could even interact with the "DOM" for Ant, and thereby interact with other tasks. Does this help? - Sam Ruby
