Gus Heck wrote: > Im wondering if part of what is happening is a migration of what people > need from a build tool...
Hi Gus ... I think what's happening is that people are building larger projects than most people who develop for Apache Ant had dealt with early in Ant history. I'm working on the build for a large Java project, 3939 lines of Ant XML. We have all sorts of configurations for the built product. Sitting there and writing two targets, one if="blah, one unless="blah", and putting both in the dependencies for the init target ... that can get old after only a few config variables! > If so, should ant change? Yes. As I said two years ago on this list, Ant (like m4, like make) is sort of a mini-Prolog, and Prolog *changed*. Like Edmund Burke's famous advice to King George III on the Stamp Act, the Prologians recognized that while everything *could* be solved purely by logic it was not always *convenient* to solve everything purely by logic. So Prolog added some control flow and iteration. Ant-contrib is a step in the right direction, only not quite far enough. I'd like to see IfElse with tasks as well as targets. -- Jack J. Woehr # "[F]ar in the empty sky a solitary esophagus slept http://www.well.com/~jax # upon motionless wing; everywhere brooded stillness, http://www.softwoehr.com # serenity, and the peace of God." - Mark Twain --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
