On 10/13/00 1:41 AM, "Stefan Bodewig" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> IMHO we shouldn't try to make Ant the solution for everything. Ant
> should be small and easy - and maybe we've already left this ground,
> I'm not sure.
We'll see. I'd like to take a look at what's grown up around Ant... I'd also
like to start back in on what should be an Ant 2.0 now that we've seen a
year of Ant in action.
> The main reason why people need enhanced conditionals is that they are
> converting old Makefiles or are used to make and think in terms of how
> they would do what they need in make.
Whereas the position that was high in my mind when writing the first few
versions of Ant was that conditional code should be expressed in -- surprise
-- code. In tasks. Now, that view of the world might have been a bit
simplistic at the time, and can be expanded to include scripting to some
degree, but I still come back to liking the "less is more" approach.
> Yes I did, but I think we'd be giving the wrong signals if we included
> anything that looks like control structures into the Ant distribution
> (even as an optional task, sorry). Once we have the extension
> mechanism up and running, I might get convinced that having a
> control.tsk jar file with <case>, <if>, <foreach> wouldn't hurt too
> much.
Whereas I pretty much remain rabidly against case, if, etc.
> DH> I'm sorry, but I just don't get it. Personally, I think this
> DH> alarmist attitude towards a test-for-value capability is just
> DH> silly.
>
> Call it paranoia if you want - but if I had the choice between moving
> Ant even slightly into the direction of make (causing a maintenance
> nightmare) or making Ant unusable in certain situations I'd chose the
> latter.
And if Ant did move that way, I'd choose to fork. Of course, that's not to
say that Ant is the "one true way" -- because it's really not. I'm sure that
there are other good ways to slice this problem. I am hesitant of having one
tool do all the slicing however.
.duncan
--
James Duncan Davidson [EMAIL PROTECTED]
!try; do()
