Hi all, Before I begin, I'd like to say that I am really impressed with Ant. I have only been playing with it for a few days now, but I've seen enough. I want to integrate it into our build process here at work as soon as possible because I'm fed up with the simple batch files and shell scripts that we use right now and I didn't want to switch to make (I guess I don't have to tell you guys why). Congratulations -- and thanks -- to all of you!
Anyway, Ant seems to be missing one feature that I'd really like to have. Since I only joined this list (and ant-user) yesterday, you'll have to excuse me if I'm going over old topics here. What I'd like to see is that the javac task automatically handles dependencies between classes. Suppose class A uses a method from class B, and both are already compiled. When class B is changed and recompiled, class A won't be recompiled automatically. I understand that this isn't as much an issue for Java as it is for C/C++, but sometimes (especially in an environment where classes evolve rapidly) changing class B breaks class A. Does anyone else think this is a worthwhile feature? It buys you the same as using make and mkdepend when you're coding in C/C++ (or when you use make and jdeps for Java), but it also increases compile time. I could write this in a few days, but I don't want to do that if it's not going to make it into the Ant distribution, or if someone else is already working on it. Thanks in advance, Matthijs Hollemans Conductor of Weird Experiments & BeOS Developer Free BeOS software @ http://home.concepts.nl/~hollies Listen to my music @ www.mp3.com/mothergoose Buzz with the Bees @ www.virtualunlimited.com
