At 12:02 25/11/00 +1100, Conor MacNeill wrote: >I do not support including jars for the optional components.
I *mostly* agree. I guess it depends on what you call optional I guess. Some things are needed to build and test ant at the moment (ie junit + xml parser) while others will become more important in future (ie xalan+stylebook or cocoon2 when we auto-gen documentation). Asking people to jump aroun all over the place to get it to build is not something I want to see. For other things that are not needed for building and/or not popular enough (ie jar for ftp task) would be excluded. When a jar is needed to build ant or is popular enough I think we should chuck it in. >By their nature >optional components are not required to develop ant nor to use the core >features of ant. but they are ;) and/or will be in future. >As the number of optional tasks grows, trying to include >and manage all the supporting jars and their versions will become a >headache. The incidence of jar version conflict also will increase. >Duplicating jars from a host of other projects doesn't really make sense to >me. I agree for other non-essentials (ie regexp/ftp/other jars) but not for necessary components. >Currently, if I install a number of different projects, I end up with a >number of versions of ant on my machine. We still get people wondering why >ant doesn't compile their files with JDK 1.3 because of the ant bundled with >Tomcat. Unfortunately this is a requirement because ant is still in active developement. It would be unacceptable for other projects to stop building because of a change in ant. It would also be unacceptable if ant stopped being able to be built and tested if stylebook/xalan/junit changed. >I think the documentation should state the dependencies and provide a URL >from which a user can download the appropriate components. I don't think >that would be too difficult. I agree for "optional" components. Cheers, Pete *------------------------------------------------------* | Despite your efforts to be a romantic hero, you will | | gradually evolve into a postmodern plot device. | *------------------------------------------------------*
