At 12:46 15/5/01 -0700, Alan George wrote: >I agree that an 'XML scripting language' is a bad idea. But on the other hand, >having 'some' conditional processing in a build tool could be a good thing. In >fact there is already 'some' conditional processing features available in ant >(e.g. the target's if and unless, the available task, dependencies, etc.). >Using the strict 'no XML scripting language' argument, these features should be >removed. To create a build environment that is generic enough to handle >multiple products and concurrent revisions and do this with ant requires some >scripting language like features. If ant can't make some of these decisions at >run time, it loses a lot of value. Or maybe I am expecting too much from ant.
I think you are confusing what Ant is supposed to do ;) Ant doesn't pretend to offer any genericness features - you can do it via DTD includes, ant-calls and complicated build.xml files but it wasn't really designed with that in mind. For Ant2 we do plan to offer genericness via "templating" - the how/why/where/whens of which have yet to be worked out but it will be probably be via some transformation tool (XSLT/Velocity/XSP/other). However I don't think the plan is to offer genericness in ant build files. 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 | *-----------------------------------------------------*
