The build system was simply too complex to be maintained and I decided to redesign it.
Build time went from 25 minutes to 5 minutes on my machine (a pentium II 366 ronzputer). Other people experienced equivalent speedups and everybody is joyful, singing and dancing and with renewed faith on mankind.
Now, during refactoring, people started to question the need for copying files in the build dirs when only a few required filtering because not only the process uses time and disk space but because...
you copy a source code filename from a stack trace, open the file, correct the bug and you're happy. Except you've been working on the copy from the build subdir, and on the next build your changes are gone.
I think almost all cocoon developers experienced the pain of this, so I decided to design a 'copy-free' design. Unfortunately, I found out that it's not so simple. And it's probably my fault!
Let me remember you that I'm the one responsible for the introduction of the <filter> task and subsystem in Ant. The design pattern was:
1) prepare the build by copying the source files (so that filter acts) 2) compile the filtered version
I was perfectly aware of the fact that this doubled the use of disk space, but disk space is not that big of a problem nowadays so I decided not to care (and nobody complained).
But the 'lost-update' issue is a much more serious one. Dead serious, I might say, the problem is that the way the javac task is designed (again, it could well be my fault since I enhanced that task a lot in the past) is that is path based.
Now, suppose that you have a codebase with 580 java files, but only one of them "Constants.java" requires filtering (for stuff like @version@ and @year@).
The ideal solution to the problem (without requiring to filter everything out would be)
<copy todir="${build.src}" filtering="on">
<fileset dir="${src}">
<include name="**/Constants.java"/>
</fileset>
</copy> <javac destdir="${build.dest}">
<src>
<fileset dir="${src}">
<exclude name="**/Constants.java"/>
</fileset>
<path location="${build.src}"/>
</src>
</javac>too bad it doesn't work because the <javac> tasks assumes that each file in its fileset is a directory!
Now: did I overlook something or javac has to be modified to allow this to happen?
[please, keep me CC-ed since I'm not subscribed to ant-dev. Thank you]
-- Stefano Mazzocchi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate [William of Ockham] --------------------------------------------------------------------
