An if and else attributes for each task would be something very helpful, I
found many many occasions where I have to create a target just for one task
that needs to be executed conditionally. 
I was thinking somewhere along the lines of putting this attribute in the
base Ant Task and so every task no matter what can have this feature which
is absolutely helpful.



-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] 
Sent: Thursday, October 09, 2003 3:41 PM
To: Ant Developers List
Subject: Re: failonerror; general solution

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




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