Peter Vogel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Personally, I'd like to see the ant designers stop "babysitting" the > development community to prevent what they view as "bad practices".
In my case, it's less about babysitting the users than preventing that "bad practices" applied by users will be used as an argument against Ant. Maybe I'm overreacting from time to time, don't know. > Please stop assuming you've encountered every SCM/build management > problem on the planet. I've never done that, I'm always asking for examples of the bigger "build management problem"s. I'm a developer who happens to also be the build manager in our shop, but I really wouldn't conside myself an expert in this area. > and let the people who manage source for a living figure out the > right way to use it for their situation. I'm less concerned about the "people who manage source for a living", really. You've said more than once, that the common "recursive makefile" pattern found almost everywhere in the make world was bad, even when applied to make. This means, that there are other, better ways to manage complicated builds in make, but for some reason, most users choose the inferior solution. Say we'd add foreach to the core - and I'm more and more leaning towards it (making myself a heretic, I guess 8-) - and we already have those many cases where we successfully anticipated the need for iterations like javac, execon, apply and in the future anton, javaon. What can we do to make user chose the "right" thing? > Were it not for the javac task in ant, I'd hazard a guess that ant > would not enjoy the popularity that it has. Probably - at least this has been the reason to start with and is the most important argument in the make vs. Ant discussion. In the meantime Ant has gathered some other quite popular tasks that show what could be done with tasks - ejbjar and junit are quite prominent examples. Stefan
