And, to add fuel to the fire, in JDK 1.3, Sun's idl2java has been replaced with "idlj". See their web page for details.
My personal take is that there are so many ways to go here that finding common ground may be hard. I'm perfectly happy to have the standard Ant tasks handle 80% of the work, and then handle the messy stuff on a one-on-one basis. For example, I'm happy to use the "java" task to invoke the particular vendor's idl2java tool that we use. Perhaps with time the numerous ways to do idl2java will be thinned out to a manageable set. Until then, is it worth the effort to try to have an all encompassing idl2java task? I think not. Each Ant user is probably using only one idl2java tool, so for his/her site, they can handle it with either the 'java' task, or 'exec', or defining a new task.
