It looks like there are some good places to begin creating an sync task for Ant. I will begin by researching the options that have been suggested. It looks like Commons VFS would be very useful.
I am thinking an sync process can work in 2 ways. First, the task could just sync 2 locations on the same local system. Second, it can expand to work with a remote location to complete an update. The second option may prove to be unnecessary since most systems already provide a facility to map remote drives as if they are local drives via NFS, Samba, Webdav and others. These methods can work outside the scope of an Ant task so this functionality does not have to fall within the scope of this work.
As for the the process of updating a destination directory from a source directory there are many ways to go. With rsync it reads entire blocks of storage for comparison. Using a Java options I think I will just go file by file and recursively drop into each directory until the process is complete. Once I compare files I will simply trigger a copy process the moment there is a difference detected. And based on the options provided by the user it could also delete files in the destination which do not exist in the source. To start I will just use a normal copy process and delay a diff/patch method for later. I will look for a diff/patch capability in utilities in the Commons projects.
Hooking in this process into Ant is where I will need help. Now that my MacOS X laptop has Java 1.4.1 I may have more luck with SAX and compiling Ant. I think I am just missing a customized ant.properties to help find a SAX parser. Any help in that area is appreciated.
I will also need a little more documentation for the Ant architecture. Is there anything written that I can read?
Thanks much,
Brennan
On Monday, March 10, 2003, at 10:30 AM, Adam Murdoch wrote:
Hi,
Commons vfs has a set of tasks for shipping files around between local and/or
remote file systems. This includes a <sync> task, which does pretty much
what you want. The tasks support local, ftp, webdav, ssh, samba, etc files
as source and destination.
The tasks still need some work however. They aren't as featured as the ant
equivalents (or as an ant sync task would need to be), and are missing things
like selectors, mappers and filters. Nothing a patch or two wouldn't take
care of :)
So, one option would be to help round out the vfs tasks, rather than starting
from scratch.
On Sun, 9 Mar 2003 12:17 am, Brennan Stehling wrote:I would like to build a sync capability as an Ant feature but I think I
need some pointers with getting started. I just tried to build Ant
1.5.2 and got some SAX problems. I also need to know where to begin
once I can get everything compiled.
The Ant feature I would like to create is something that I would like
to use at work. I manage a 3 tier development system where we have a
development, test and production environment. I have an Ant script
doing all of the building for me and once it is built I want to copy
the files to the test and production servers. To do this I want an Ant
process that does something like rsync, but to start it will just do
copying to local directories.
The sync process will do a comparison to check if files need to be
created, replaced or deleted in the destination location. The behavior
would also need to be configurable. I could create software which
would do all of this outside of Ant, but it seems like a logical
feature to add to Ant.
I would appreciate any feedback on this idea...
Thanks,
Brennan Stehling - Java Developer
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-- Adam
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