Ant "features"

[Jakob Ramskov]

Hiya Ant developers.   I'm very fond of Ant, it kind of removed my need to use an IDE. Now I just use a simple java-aware text editor to code in.   Anyway there are a few "features" in Ant that I dislike.   1) How come you can't use wildcards in <delete file=.. ? For instance in my rel dir, I would like to delete all .properties after they have been added to my jar via. <delete file="*.properties"> ... I feel handicapped without.   2) There's something wrong with the java compiler. the docs say that only .java files that are newer than the .class file gets compiled. Well is it clever enough to compare against the .class files in the deployment directory? Because I don't store my class files with the java files. Perhaps the reason why, everytime I run ant, ALL my .java files get compiled, and not just the ones I edited, is that I use packages. I call the command like this:   <javac srcdir="src/client" destdir="rel/client" /> where each dir has a package called "com.ramosa.blabla" inside. It's not intelligent enough to figure out which files needs compiling. 3) build.compiler="modern" doesn't work, even though I have JDK1.3.0 installed, i miss a verbose output that tells me exactly what compiler is used, rather than just "classic/modern" since I have 2 or 3 installed.   Other than that, it's a wonderfull tool, keep it up!   - Jakob