I know this isn't a helpful argument, but... And make *is* supported? When was the last time you got a support organization to change make for you? The best (IMHO) implementation of make is also free and "unsupported" - it's from GNU. You will get better and more responsive (and cheaper ;)) support from this list for Ant than you will get from a commercial company for make. Their only motivation is to turn a profit, and let's face it, make is not a profit-generating product.
This argument works on people with common sense, but unfortunately is usually useless against management types. (Read that however you like. ;)) Honestly, you might want to consider a hybrid. No offense listers, but Ant absolutely sucks at C/C++ builds. It's absolutely wonderful for Java and general file maintenance (i.e. copying files). For general target matching, though, it isn't great. You could write your own tasks to do C/C++ much better, but they don't exist today. (*That's* the real beauty of Ant - extensibility.) Because of this, I've used the make/Ant hybrid approach a few times. You can have Ant call make, or probably better in your case, have make call Ant. (That way your developers may never know, and you can show your managers that you're still using make. ;)) If you do this, put your Java bits in Ant, and your C++ bits in make. I hope this helps. roger __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get personalized email addresses from Yahoo! Mail - only $35 a year! http://personal.mail.yahoo.com/
