dean
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Can I suggest trying something new possibly? ant-contrib might be a good idea, but is it possible to have the ant manual contain(ant repository still would NOT contain the jars such as ant-contrib, just docs)
1. Core Tasks
2. Optional Tasks
3. External Self-Contained Tasks
4. External Tasks
Then, people who write tasks can put the task in ant-contrib and post the documentation to ant, so at least it can get some visibility. People could also include download links to the jars from the manual, to download the additional things needed. I think this would be very useful.
I donīt think that is a good idea. There are so many different projects with their tasks (and their own doc-style). Therefore you have - multiple styles - very often changes
But do you know the "External Tools and Tasks" page on the homepage? http://ant.apache.org/external.html
I have one more suggestion. Ant contrib was saying I have to change the build file. It would be really nice if the only thing we had to do was drop in the ant-contrib jar in the lib directory of ant, and ant used a different classloader to read out of unknown jars to check the tasks.properties file, and if there was one automatically add the tasks without changes to the build file. I don't think it's that hard to do. Search lib directory for jars not called ant.jar and optional.jar, and then load that jar in a different class loader just to get the properties file and read it in to get all the tasks. What do you think?
We (or more "the other" :-) are working on something called "ant libs" (or something similiar). I think that should do that job.
Jan
