Peter,
While i agree, ant should not be forced to implement everything make does, it would be nice to have the ability to have a generic "compile" task. The reason for this is for apis like rmi (though I think there's an rmic task), idl, and jaxb, which do preprocessing of files, and then generate java code. It would avoid having to write seperate tasks for each one as they come a long, making it easier to support new preprocessor type apis...
just my $.02
Peter Donald wrote:
On Fri, 3 Aug 2001 15:26, Stefan Bodewig wrote:
On Thu, 2 Aug 2001, Peter Donald <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
We should talk about that in the context of Ant2, for now it would give us a major backwards compatibilty problem.
I can not see that - where do you see the compatability problem?
We already have built-in tasks that have attributes and nested elements of the same name (see javac with classpath). Tasks may have chosen to do different things with them (javac does, but this is silly).
but they are still differentiable .. you said so as much below ;) Which means that there is not likely to be overlap (I would say extremely unlikely).
Attributes are restricted to primitive types + string and File at the moment,
Not true at all - attributes are restricted to types that have a constructor using a single String argument, while lements are restricted to types that have a no-arg constructor. I'd guess it is not that uncommon for a class to support both types of constructors.
oh ;)
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 | *-----------------------------------------------------*
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