cvs commit: jakarta-ant/docs/ant2 features.html

[bodewig]

bodewig     01/06/11 05:21:20

  Modified:    docs/ant2 features.html
  Log:
  Finished the document. This is IMHO as good as it can be at the current
  state of discussion.
  
  Revision  Changes    Path
  1.4       +72 -2     jakarta-ant/docs/ant2/features.html
  
  Index: features.html
  ===================================================================
  RCS file: /home/cvs/jakarta-ant/docs/ant2/features.html,v
  retrieving revision 1.3
  retrieving revision 1.4
  diff -u -r1.3 -r1.4
  --- features.html     2001/06/06 13:41:47     1.3
  +++ features.html     2001/06/11 12:21:17     1.4
  @@ -270,7 +270,9 @@
   
       <p>This is list is not complete, it just highlights some of the
       rejected features and tries to explain why they&apos;ve been
  -    rejected.</p>
  +    rejected.  Two very common reasons to reject something were, that
  +    the request has been too vague or the same functionality could
  +    already be provided by some other accepted new feature.</p>
   
       <p>For a complete listing of all requested features, see <a
       href="requested-features.html">requested-features.html</a>. The
  @@ -280,6 +282,74 @@
       lines contained either <code>[VOTE]</code> or
       <code>[DISC]</code>.</p>
   
  +    <h2>Simple Flow-Control</h2>
  +
  +    <p>People asking for these kind of things have often heard the
  +    standard "Ant shall not become yet another scripting language, Ant
  +    shall not fall into the same traps make/Perl did ..." response
  +    from the committers and some long-term ant-dev people.</p>
  +
  +    <p>The long version of that answer is:</p>
  +
  +    <ul>
  +      <li>There are lots of open source scripting languages, there is
  +      no need to define a new one.</li>
  +
  +      <li>Ant has been created to be a build tool.  While you can use
  +      it for a whole lot of other things, this is not Ant's primary
  +      focus (and it shouldn't be).  Most use-cases that ask for
  +      flow-control are out of Ant's scope.</li>
  +
  +      <li>Ant already provides the requested functionality for many
  +      common situations.  The execon and apply tasks can be used to
  +      iterate over a set of files as the (planed for Ant2) javaon and
  +      anton tasks will do.</li>
  +
  +      <li>Providing flow-control inside Ant's core would increase the
  +      complexity of this core.  This would make it difficult for new
  +      contributors to understand how Ant works and increase the
  +      maintenance cost for Ant at the same time.  The goal of the Ant
  +      developers is to push as much complexity and functionality out
  +      of Ant's core into the tasks as possible.</li>
  +    </ul>
  +
  +    <p>That being said, Ant2 will make it easy to write iteration or
  +    conditional tasks via the new container task concept.  We expect
  +    foreach, switch and if tasks to be written, but they will probably
  +    not become core parts of the Ant distribution.</p>
  +
  +    <h2>Advanced Conditionals for if/unless Attributes</h2>
  +
  +    <p>The argument here is the same as for flow-control.  We are
  +    talking about complexity that can be pushed from the core to tasks
  +    - and that is what will be done.  Instead of additional power for
  +    the if/unless attributes, Ant2 will have a new task that can set
  +    properties based on the values of other properties or logical
  +    combinations of other conditions, something like (making up
  +    syntax):</p>
  +
  +<pre>
  +&lt;condition name=&quot;javamail-complete&quot;&gt;
  +  &lt;and&gt;
  +    &lt;available class=&quot;javax.mail.Transport&quot;/&gt;
  +    &lt;available class=&quot;javax.activation.DataHandler&quot;/&gt;
  +  &lt;/and&gt;
  +&lt;/condition&gt;
  +</pre>
  +
  +    <p>will become possible</p>
  +
  +    <h2>Multi-Threaded Execution of Targets</h2>
  +
  +    <p>The general feeling was, that the combination of target
  +    dependencies and multi-threading would soon become too complex,
  +    especially since Ant2 will allow people to explicitly enforce the
  +    order in which (independent) targets will be executed.</p>
  +
  +    <p>This issue will be explored again later, it has not been
  +    rejected for all time being, but it is out of scope for
  +    Ant&nbsp;2.0</p>
  +
       <h1>Ideas for New Tasks and Tools</h1>
   
       <p>Please refer to <a
  @@ -289,7 +359,7 @@
       for this.</p>
   
       <hr>
  -      <p align="center">$Id: features.html,v 1.3 2001/06/06 13:41:47 bodewig 
Exp $</p>
  +      <p align="center">$Id: features.html,v 1.4 2001/06/11 12:21:17 bodewig 
Exp $</p>
         <p align="center">Copyright &copy; 2001 Apache Software
           Foundation. All rights Reserved.</p>
     </body>