I'm working on a little command line tool that uses Ant. I've gotten a basic tool working, but I've been going over the Ant source code a little, and there are a few questions I have about possible improvement . . .
1) It would appear that a real workhorse method is ProjectHelper.configureProject(Project, File). This method handles FileNotFoundException by dumping a stack trace. In general, it seems to me that utility, third party methods that handle files should almost never consume IOExceptions, but rather should propagate them, since the controlling app will have its own way of dealing with these exceptions.
2) Project doesn't have any methods for removing targets.
3) Project *does* have an addOrReplaceTarget() method, which can be of help in reloading a build file. However, ProjectHelperImpl doesn't use this method, so any attempt to reload a buildfile throws a bunch of "Duplicate Target" exceptions.
I suppose 3) could be handled easily by writing my own impl of ProjectHelper, that differs only in that it uses addOrReplaceTarget(). But is there any reason why ProjectHelperImpl itself shouldn't be modified to do this? With 1), I'd have to change ProjectHelper, and I'd probably have to since to modify the code so configureProject() throws an exception would break existing code. As for 2), there's not a lot that can be done -- without a removeTarget() method, there's no such thing as a reusable project. I suppose I could write my own Project class, and maybe that wouldn't be so bad since what a Project mostly gives you is a collection of Targets, and it's the Targets that do the real work.
I was wondering what thoughts were, on context of the intent and culture of the Ant development effort. By the way, this is my first foray into the 'dev' list of an open source effort, so I apologize for any faux pas I'm certain to have made and equally certain to commit in the future.
Keep up the good work, Chris
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