At 12:48 6/12/00 -0800, James Duncan Davidson wrote: >> Ant has become that successful that people are going wild and add >> tasks for everything. This is great. > >It is great. However, there are two bad influences at work here -- 1) >Everybody has a neat way to further extend the relatively simple yet power >concept of mapping the XML data files into tasks and 2) people see this >simple thing as something that can be further abstracted out into something >more. As to the first, XML is just a data format for Ant -- it's not >supposed to be core to Ant -- in fact, the first 2 versions of Ant which >predated release to Apache ran on properties. To the second -- if there are >ideas that people want to leverage in other ways, great -- but I really >don't want to see Ant morph into the be-all/end-all. The pursuit of this >kind of thing is what Stefano and others have called at various times the >"Flexibility Syndrome" -- too much flexibility will *kill* your codebase, >even if it is "cool".
"Flexibility Syndrome" is not about the number of tasks that exists but it is introducing "joints" where they are not useful. Perl and make are prime examples of this - Perl developers generally have a motto "If you can't do it 15 different ways then your language is lacking ;)". If you seperate each different concern and apply the 80/20 rule and do not add overlapping features then you can generally avoide the problem. There are some cases where this is not the case ... thou these are extremely rare (and I don't think Ant falls into that hole). Cheers, Pete *-----------------------------------------------------* | "Faced with the choice between changing one's mind, | | and proving that there is no need to do so - almost | | everyone gets busy on the proof." | | - John Kenneth Galbraith | *-----------------------------------------------------*
