Jose Alberto Fernandez wrote: > I think that rather than adding another attribute here and another there, we > need to rethink the way properties are passed and then fix the problem at > the root. I think that is part of the agenda for ANT2.
Fair enough, but Ant2 is way down the road - we won't be seeing this for a couple of months at least and we will probably see at least one more Ant 1.x release before then. In point of fact, we may see a number of 1.x releases as people who need the JDK 1.1.x capability keep maintaining it. This is a not unreasonable feature to ask for. The default behaviour is the status quo - properties from the parent override those of the child. Only those who require the child properties to override the parent will do so with the attribute flag. I think this is a case of providing an advanced feature for those who really need it, but doing our best to make it difficult to shoot yourself in the foot with it. If you want to use it, you have to explicitly ask for it. The original reason for having the properties of the parent take precedence over the child's stems from the same train of thought that says properties from the command line override those set in the build file. The rational is pretty much exactly what Creag described. While this is appropriate in the vast majority of cases, there have been times when I *really* wanted to be able to inherit properties from the parent. So in my reduced role as an effectively inactive commiter I'm supporting this with a +1. Any vetoes? > We need to look at the big picture. Otherwise we will finish with a mush of > individual and sometimes contradictory features. That's a fair statement too. But I would argue that the big picture includes providing those who need it the power to get the job done. Glenn McAllister
