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!
For big projects, ant-contrib makes sense. I personally use try/catch in places to deal with installation grief only, the rest is declarative. And we do scary things here, things called C++, CppUnit and .NET :(
The trouble with putting it in from the beginning is that it encourages bad ways.
And look what we have instead; some tasks have failoneeror, some dont; those that do sometimes have different defaults from others (exec and java default to false).
An alternate future option is to use aspects on the tasks, so that
<taskFoo ant:failonerror="true"> hands failure handling off to Ant, not the task. This has been discussed before, usually in the context of Ant2.0
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
which was?
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.
Did it? Why, that is a crime against tail recursion!
Actually one of the nice things of prolog is that its list structure was clean and elegant and easily used.
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