I totally agree with everything you in this post Conor ;-) --DD > -----Original Message----- > From: Conor MacNeill [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sent: Friday, August 01, 2003 5:28 AM > To: Ant Developers List > Subject: Re: override > > On Fri, 1 Aug 2003 07:40 pm, Jose Alberto Fernandez wrote: > > > > OK, lets get on the nitty gritty of the matter. :-) > > > > What do you mean by unrelated imports? If they are unrelated why do you > > need to import them toghether? > > They may be unrelated because they are written by different people. > > I will give an example. Let's say one person distributes a build fragment, > a > template really, for building a Java project. Someone else distributes a > fragment to do documentation generation. In both cases I want to use the > bulk > of the template as is but I need to override some of the steps. In the > java > generation fragment I wish to add an xdoclet step before the compile step > whereas in the documetation generation I have some funky logo processing > that > needs to be inserted into the document generation workflow. > > So it is this overriding that prevents me from using straight <ant>. The > authors of the fragments can't know my special requirements but that is no > problem as I can override some individual steps. The authors may have even > inserted empty targets to make overriding easy - classic template method > pattern. > > Unfortunately the authors of the two build fragments don't know of the > existence of each other and used the same target names in their fragments > whether it is a simple "init", "compile", "clean" or any of the other very > common names you find in builds. > > > Why don't you use <ant/> to call between the > > unrelated targets? In other words, the now famous example of "bad" > > crosstalk, I could argue is due to bad usage of the <import/> feature. > > You could argue that but you'd be wrong :-) > > > The > > build should not have imported files A and B, but just <ant/> them. You > > should have gotten the desired effect. > > No override - back to copy, paste and hack. I lose all the benefits. > > > > > On the other hand, if you have to import them, then it is because they > have > > to share something or one defines some target for the other, or > something. > > I disagree. Importing them into a common build does not imply they have > something in common other than they are both fragments I wish to use in my > build process. If you want them to interact you should achieve that > *explicitly* by operations in the importing build file not by some > implicit > coincidence of names. > > > If that is the case, then you are crosstalking. And then the whole > argument > > changes. You would have to add something to the language to be able to > say: > > for this target I want crosstalk, but for that other I do not. > > > > I think this will lead to spagguetti incomprenhensible buildfiles when > > things go on large scale. > > I disagree. What will be spaghetti will be trying to determine the subtle > failures that come about because of unintended interactions. Not only > that, > there will be no alternative but to alter the fragments, defeating their > purpose. Every fragment author will need to know about every other > fragment > author's naming scheme. It is this that will not scale to a large system - > a > system where you can reuse build fragments written by other people. > > Conor
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