Hello Dominique, Thanks for the suggestion, but that solution misses the point. If we just had it stored as "build.properties" so that it always existed it would achieve the same thing as the entity include stuff you are talking about so that doesn't seem to approach my hopeful solution. I actually am using the entity include for Tomcat Ant Manager tasks and it works pretty slick :-)
But the point of the sample.build.properties is that each person may have their own. Each person can add/change/remove properties from their own copy of build.properties but we always want to have a reference available for the standard stuff that goes in build.properties hence the copy from sample.* to * only if * doesn't exist. Sounds like I'm going to have to forgo the sample. stuff for build.properties. Works fine for everything else because we can guarantee that the other files will be copied from sample.* to * before they are needed by the build. There just isn't a good way to do that will build.properties. BTW, is the <import> tag that you mention available in Ant-1.5.1beta1? I thought that was only going to be Ant2 functionality? Jake Monday, September 09, 2002, 4:41:21 PM, you wrote: DD> Sounds to me that you should maybe avoid this kind of trouble by using DD> entity include instead of your <copy> of sample files... That way, you can DD> have a properly named project whose entire body is empty but for the entity DD> reference. Pretty much achieve what you do with <copy>, without the trouble DD> you're running into with properties. Check out the Ant FAQ for details on DD> entity including an XML fragment file. DD> You could also go with the embed proposal (that defines an <import> tag), DD> but that's a little more on the bleeding edge. --DD DD> -----Original Message----- DD> From: Jacob Kjome [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] DD> Sent: Monday, September 09, 2002 4:29 PM DD> To: Ant Users List DD> Subject: loading build.properties before other properties when it doesn't DD> exist before building ... DD> Hi, DD> I have a project where we have sample files such as sample.web.xml or DD> sample.build.properties. I copy these files to a file of the same DD> name minus the ".sample" prefix. That is all working fine. The DD> problem is with the unique case of build.properties. DD> Normally, I load buld.properties first thing before defining other DD> properties so that properties in the build file can be overridden by DD> those in build.properties. However, the target that runs the copy of DD> sample.buld.properties to build.properties runs *after* all the DD> properties would have been defined. So, with a fresh CVS tree, DD> running ant for the first time on my build file fails to load DD> properties from build.properties because it does not exist yet. DD> Now, I would put the <copy> deal before DD> <property file="build.properties"/> DD> but the latter needs to be before all the properties are defined which DD> aren't inside a target. Since I can't put <copy> anywhere outside a DD> <target> element, I can't make the copy happen before the rest of the DD> properties are defined. DD> Is there a good way to deal with this situation other than, maybe, DD> putting all the <property ...> definitions inside a <target ...> DD> element, thereby allowing me to run the <copy ...> task to copy the DD> sample.build.properties to build.properties then load it, then define DD> all the other propeprties? DD> Jake -- Best regards, Jacob mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
