The requirements for implementing such functionality is that there is an ability to ask a task "did you do something?". Ie. the Task interface has a method "boolean isUpToDate()" (or something). To my understanding there is no such thing on the Task-interface.
It would be possible to add something like that but that would break the existing tasks. If there was a base-class for the tasks (instead of an interface) one could add such a method that by default returns false (ie. is not up-to-date), so that it is always run by default and if one wanted to support such optimization one returns true at the correct times. The question though is how much time would actually be saved? I think that some time might actually be saved since it doesn't need to hit the disk as often and that many tasks could be skipped in a long chain. (For my own current project I really expect the time-savings could be potential.) But this is just guessing... -----Original Message----- From: Erik Meade [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, November 08, 2000 7:14 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Skipping tasks I'm wondering about allowing tasks to be "skipped" if the tasks they are dependent on do nothing. Lets say I have three targets, A, B, and C. C is dependent on A and B. A compiles my source files to a classes directory, B copies over the manifest and/or the deployment descriptor C jars them up. If A doesn't compile any files and B doesn't copy over the files because they haven't changed, I would prefer that C not jar. If memory serves me correctly having the jar task verify all the dates doesn't get you much until you have a large number of files, but it seems to me maybe there would be a way to "infer" that since A and B did nothing, C should do nothing too? Anyway to do this now? Any reason someone shouldn't try to add this functionality if it doesn't already exists? Erik Meade
