On Sat, 9 Feb 2002, Erik Hatcher wrote: > > I DON'T WANT TO UPGRADE THE BUILDFILE, and certainly not to be forced > > to do that. > > So, don't upgrade your version of Ant then.
But another project I depend on will. And probably another developer will have the newer version of ant installed. I typically have at least 8 projects checked out at a time, including 3 versions of tomcat, and I already have 2 versions of ant installed. > > - you can write a makefile for a 10 year old make and it'll work with any > > newer make. I don't have to upgrade my makefile with every release of gnu > > make. > > Ant is NOT make. We should not necessarily make comparisons between the > two. Getting rid of inconsistencies and cruft and keeping Ant's design and > internals clean is a worthier goal than backwards compatibility in many > respects. I'm not sure I understand you - ant and make are 2 tools that serve the same purpose ( or at least you can use either of them to build a project). I don't think there are too many things you can do in ant you can't do in make. Ant started as a 'better' make. There are a lot of inconsistencies and cruft in make - yet all versions of gnumake do their best to support all of those, and it seems all those developers believe that respecting a defacto standard is more important and worthier goal than making their design simpler. One big difference is that we use XML - which is the magic tool that is supposed to allow everyone to speak the same language and different programs to communicate with each other. Yet we can't get 2 versions of ant to understand the same XML file. Wait until someone figures out that using the latest features in JDK1.4 will make ant's design cleaner and simpler - and maybe we can add an deprecation warning every time someone is using JDK1.3, then remove the support for it. > > - you can write a html page that displays in netscape2.0. People don't > > have to upgrade their pages every for every new browser. > > Writing real web applications that would satisfy your customer or company > and the end users who expect much more is not possible with such "least > common denominator" HTML coding though. The stakes are bumped up to 4.0 > browsers and up these days for all projects I've been involved in lately. Yes, I'm a very satisfied customer when I can't connect to a bank because they require internet explorer... And I'm sure a company should be happy they lost a customer because I couldn't buy without booting in windows. Costin -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
