Hi, At our company we're developing Ada95 code for various platforms, including OpenVMS. We've built our own development tools based on Ant for this. I was wondering if someone in the Ant community had some useful tips or other information on this topic to share. E.g. what tasks work / don't work.
I have experienced some problems myself using the <exec> task: - To use Runtime.exec() the command to be executed usually has to be written into a temporary DCL script first. Then this script is executed using Runtime.exec(). - The Java 1.4 JVM provided by Compaq/HP has some problems with Runtime.exec(). Specifically it doesn't support the variant of Runtime.exec() with a specified working directory (Runtime#exec(String[], String[], File)). - The Ant <exec> task throws a BuildException if the exit code is unequal zero. On VMS an odd exit code signifies success and even exit codes are errors. (The exit code zero actually signifies a warning.) I implemented my own <exec> task by subclassing ExecTask to get around these incompatibilities. But it proved to be quite hard as some fields and methods are private and/or final. So I think it would probably be easier to implement an <exec> task which only is for VMS and plug that in when running on VMS. Of course all tasks based on ExecTask still won't work. I.e. <apply> and <chmod>. The latter probably doesn't make sense on VMS anyways, but <apply> would be nice to have. Maybe <apply> could be refactored to use the <exec> task instead of subclass its implementation. Does this make sense? Regards, -- knut
