Magesh Umasankar summarizes the "don't break compatibility" argument as follows:

> I don't think Ant should sacrifice backwards
> compatibility - in such cases, Ant Dev's approach
> has mostly been to retain existing behavior while
> allowing new behavior to be configured with additional
> attributes.

and:

> A change to the existing behavior of <javac> practically
> means a rewrite of *every* ant build file out there.

But Steve Loughran reveals that Ant has been sacrificing backwards
compatibility and changing the existing behavior of <javac> in the last three
releases: 

> So...up to ant1.3 the situation was
> debug=false was the default, but you really got -g:lines,source
> 
> in ant1.4 you got
> debug=false was the default, and you really got  -g:none
> 
> in ant1.5 we got
> debug=false was the default, but you could select which options to debug.
> When you set debug=true the default was -g:source,lines,vars

Thus, we have an existence proof that the debug default setting can be changed
without creating community trauma. 

> So if people are trying to fix things to be compatible with javac and
> backwards compatible, they  come up with a system that
> -defaults  to -g: source,lines
> -when debug=false really generates nothing
> -when debug=true really generates everything

Sounds good to me. 

Philip



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