> From: Peter Donald [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > > >> Flow control is not the right way to do it in most cases (all > >> of them???) - > >> instead templating offers a better alternative. > >> Unfrortunately we have to > >> wait till ant2 before this becomes a reality ;) > >> > > > >I keep listening to "templating" as one of these magic > bullets. I have not > >seen the first concreate example on how such "templating" > mechanism could > >work and how it can be applied to solve any of the issues > people claim it > >can solve. > > > >Can someone enlight us and show how they conceived such a > thing to work? I > >am not asking for running code, just give some hand waving example. > > > >Half of the time these has been proposed, I fail to see how > it can be used > >to solve the problem without becomming yet another full language. > > Who saids it won't be another fully blown language? ;) XSLT is what I > intend to use unless something better comes along. > Essentially it allows > you to do as much or as little transformation on your build > files as you want. >
XSLT is nice for little things. But it is a language 10 times more complex than ANT. If that is the alternative we are givin real users, I do not think it will be useful for 90% of them. I also fail to see how you can do property expansion and such using plain XSLT. Without that we have non of the power of ANT. Don't take me wrong, I am sure there will be some narrow very cleverly define set of build files that will be able to use such an approach, but I do not see it as the general magic bullet people keep on proposing it for. > Most logic requests have been about setting values of > properties, recursive > ant calls based on directories, repetition of ant targets > with different > parameters etc. These can almost always be determined > statically but are > done at runtime because there is as yet no templating done. > Effectively > most people want to squish the functionality of autoconf, > automake and make > into one process (when naturally thats a bad idea). > Humm, by this reasoning, we could remove fileset wild characters since we can achieved the same thing using templates ;-) Of course the point is simplicity of use. I am not sure we will gain that with XSLT. We will need something taylored to ANTs needs. Jose Alberto
