New thread.
+1 :)
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.
I'll defer commenting on this until I ponder it more and see what others say about it.
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.
Well, again, don't stretch my thoughts on this too far. I meant it didn't matter *now*, in terms of getting it migrated to HEAD and having it in a place handy for all of us to work with and evolve it. It does matter though.
- 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"/> ).
Wow.... ok, still pondering....
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.
It'll take some thinking and convincing for me to see why antlib needs descriptors that get processed like Ant build files. Something as simple as Digester would seem to do the trick (bootstrap craziness?!) but as I said, I want to see what others think and let myself consider your idea a bit more.
Erik
