There are two sides of the story here, one side is the internal organization of ANT itself, design patterns, reuse of code etc, etc. I totally agree that reworking of execution model is necessary, and the Thomas/Stefan new proposed model will be far better than the current one.
However, the second side of the story is, that the ANT user _does not care_ at all how ANT is organized internally. What the user cares about, is functionality which ANT offers or not. I suggest, we could think of the "interface", i.e. the task name + task attribute names, and add it for the time being with crapy implementation (with code duplication, no reuse, etc) and than "rework" it later. I even think this "interface-goes-first" model of development might prove to be better, than "what-goes-inside-must-be-perfect-first"... If we provide new task with standard "interface", we might rework the internal details later, and it will not influence the user at all. From the very begining everybody is using Javac, but Javac is not finished still, and it is not likely to be finished soon either... if we said: 'Javac will be added later once we sort out all the internal details', nobody would use ANT at all. I also think, the "release" is all about functionality, new/changed task names, attribute names, etc, not about how-we-did-it-this-time inside. just the thought Mariusz > DF> I've used this patch and feature for my application. Apparently, > DF> it hasn't been "grafted" into the Ant distribution. Has this > DF> functionality of specifying a source directory for exec been > DF> added? If so, how do I use it? > > It has not been added for some reasons, one of them being that a > directory based Exec task would be somewhat ambiguos. We agreed on > reworking this a little - crafting a new task that would combine Exec > with MatchingTask but that would be new task of its own right. > > I'm going to work on this, it's on my TODO list but only at position > five or six - I really want to include Thomas Haas execution framework > before I start anything like this, as this will improve Exec itself a > lot. > > Oh and yes, this won't happen before the scheduled Ant release either > I'm afraid.
