New thread. Ok, I thought about it - and I will agree with the majority that XML should be used.
However I'm more convinced than ever that the XML should use a subset of ant, and reuse the same processing infrastructure. I.e. not another parser or rules. Erik and few others seem to believe that the XML vocabulary doesn't matter, and anything can be generated by xdoclet and processed. If this is the case - then using ant syntax in the antlib descriptor would be as good as another syntax. I'm not saying that ant XML processing is perfect. It can be argued that a more strict syntax, schema, namespaces would be better. However we should do all this in a consistent way. My proposal is very simple: - the descriptor will be an ant fragment. - the top level will be <antlib> ( or anything else ). The ProjectHelper can be easily modified to accept both ant and antlib. - we can restrict the set of elements under antlib to taskdef, typdef or role ( after role is added to ant ), or we can allow more There are many use cases that would be enabled. I'm not saying any of this is a good idea, or we should do it - I don't think anyone can predict what we will need in future. All I'm arguing is that we may need to extend the descriptor, and it would far better if we wouldn't invent another weel - and just use what we have. - maybe we want antlibs to have some initialization. This can be easily done by allowing more ant elements in the descriptor - maybe we'll want to allow antlib to declare targets - that could be used in depends or antcall ( <target name="foo" depends="myAntLib:antlibTarget"/> ). Again - those are just examples, there are a lot of things that could be done easily. Even if you don't need any of this - it would be nice to not have to repeat the long and painfull evolution of the main xml processor. Costin
