<Apologies in advance if this was an obvious question about Ant 1.3> I'm starting to implement an optional task to execute basic operations on other Java objects and my first thought was to simply extend the existing Java task, since it already has a bunch of functionality I need (classpath handling, basic forking, etc.). But all the member variables there are private, making them inacessible to subclasses; hence I'm out of luck.
A quick review of some other core taskdefs shows that some tasks declare everything private, some protected, and I can't figure out a particular difference between which kinds of tasks are which. Why the difference? And why not use protected as the default for most classes? (if you don't want people subclassing, then just declare yourself final, I'd think). - Shane
