(I haven't been following all of this discussion, but had a comment) Several Xalanites have been thinking about this whole topic lately: how to use different versions of common tools, especially standards-based ones. I like having Gump tell me daily if the xalan CVS works with the xerces CVS with the ant CVS with...; on the other hand, sometimes I want to take a few days off to simply attack an internal coding issue, and don't want to deal with other project's changes, I just want to work temporarily on a specific set of released .jars of other products. (Blah blah blah, Shane, hurry up and get to the point)
I'd like to see solutions that by default allow individual apache projects to work 'out of the box' with minimal setup, so that end users can just pick up Xalan or whatever and have it work. As long as we can do this, I'm also happy to help do a little extra work (either in Xalan or in coordination between apache projects) to allow *experienced* users to take a current Xalan release and then easily run it with version P.Q of Xerces and version A.B of Ant, etc. I bring this up because an assumption (even if you document it clearly all over your project) like "you NEVER in any circumstances have multiple implementations of ant library sitting in classpath" is sure ot be ignored or skipped over by users who will then regularly ping your list with requests for help. This is a common theme on xalan-dev, in our case mainly because people have mismatched DOM or JAXP classes. Yes, it'd make our job of building these tools easier by requiring certain environment settings, but realistically it'll make the user's lives much easier (and probably more likely to use our tools) if we are less sensitive to other environment issues and provide crystal-clear doc on what to avoid and especially how to fix it (after the silly user ignored our warning about what to avoid). - Shane ---- you "Sam Ruby" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote ---- > > Peter Donald wrote: > > > > It is highly recomended that you NEVER in any circumstances have multiple > > implementations of ant library sitting in classpath. To fix this you can > > simply delete crimson/jaxp and replace with another compiler (ie xerces). ... > I am deliberately avoiding the discussion as to whether jars should be > placed in CVS, but I still very strongly believe that there should be > *SOME* mechanism short of physically modifying a downloaded distribution by > which the person who is attempting to use the tool gets some say into how > it is used. > > - Sam Ruby
