Re: Description

[Craeg K. Strong]

OK, I have some thoughts on this patch. Firstly, let me say that I think a
description element is a good thing. In fact I thought that was how the
target descriptions should have been done (i.e. elements not attributes). My
concern is the fact that description has been implemented as a data type. It
IS convenient to implement it that way, but conceptually it feels wrong. The
description, is not a datatype. The fact that this datatype does not hold
its own data but redirects it straight into the project object is an
indicator of this mismatch, IMHO.
Actually, I have to admit I agree with your conceptual taste here.  Back 
in June I originally proposed to
emulate Property ( 
http://www.mail-archive.com/ant-dev%40jakarta.apache.org/msg07491.html )
because you eventually want project-wide descriptions (analogous to 
global properties) _and_ target descriptions
(analogous to target-specific properties).    I was more of a 
ant-coder-newbie at that time and was concerned
about the magnitude of such a change.  Stefan suggested implementing it 
as a datatype, and that's what I did.

Stefan, please correct me if I am wrong, but I assumed your reasons for 
suggesting the DataType
implementation were that you liked the functionality and saw the 
DataType approach as an easy,
low-cost, low-risk way to get it into the build.  We could always change 
it and enhance later....?

I would be happy to submit a revised version of <description> which 
could provide something
like the following enhancements:

- multiple instances of <description> at the same level are concatentated
- works at project level and/or target level
- reimplemented as a task along lines of Property
- maintain target level description attributes for backward compatibility
Note that, while this is a fair chunk of coding work, it maintains 
buildfile backward compatibility.

BTW, You can't currently have two <description> elements although I guess we
could decide what that means and potentially concatenate them.
Yes.  If that is what we want, maybe its better to make that (trivial) 
change now so there is
less of a backward compatibility problem.  One way to do this is to change:

addText(String text) {
 project.setDescription(text);
}
to something like this:
addText(String text) {
  StringBuffer sb = new StringBuffer();
  if (project.getDescription())  {
     sb.append(project.getDescription());
     sb.append(System.getProperty("line.separator"));
   }
  sb.append(text);
  project.setDescription(sb.toString());
}
in types/Description.java        Thoughts?
I would have thought this element should have been handled directly in the
ProjectHelper parsing code. 

You mean analogous to the way Property is handled, right?   (see above)
It also creates little oddities such as
<project name="test" default="main">
 <description>All your buildfile are belong to us</description>
 <target name="main">
    <description>The main event</description>
 </target>
 <target name="never">
    <description>No GST, never ever</description>
 </target>
</project>
....where the output of --projecthelp is "No GST, never ever"
That is correct.   This potential ugliness can be documented, however.
Question to committers:  what course of action do you recommend?  Is 
there anything here
serious enough to merit a beta-bug-fix?

Conor
--Craeg