Hi, before becoming lucky by picking the best two weeks of Northrhine Westfalia's school holidays as our family vacation time I committed a change to the <ant> task that added an alowNativeBasedir attribute.
When this attribute has been set to true, the basedir of the called project will be the same that it would be when invoked from the command line (i.e. the dir attribute and the inheritall properties are ignored for this). Not only is this what one might have expected to be the default behavior of the Ant task, it is also part of my attempt to fix <https://issues.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=30569>. Dominique stumbled over the commit and commented on the bugzilla issue. Like him I prefer to keep any discussion on this list (I never intended to discuss the change in bugzilla but was keeping a record of the changes I made). <ant>'s dir attribute is also used to actually locate the build file, so in certain situations it may be valid to set both attributes on the same task. Currently I'm stuck with implementing allowNativeBasedir (or whatever its final name may be) in situations that involve more than one layer of <ant> tasks - which is what we have in the bugreport: a build invoked via <ant> in turn uses <subant> and the later doesn't set the expected basedirs for the (grand)child builds. Let's say we have: A.xml: <project basedir="A" name="A"> <ant dir="foo" antfile="B.xml"/> </project> B.xml: <project basedir="B" name="B"> <ant allowNativeBasedir="true" antfile="C.xml"/> </project> then project B will have a basedir of "foo" when run via project A (which is fine since it is documented that way). The problem is, so will have project C because of the way we implemented "basedir inheritance". When project B is created we set "basedir" as an "inherited property", i.e. a property somewhere between a "user property" and a "normal property". Even with inheritall="false", <ant> will invoke copyInheritedProperties() to copy over all inherited properties from project B to project C - and in the presence of the property "basedir" project C will ignore the basedir attribute of the build file. We can't simply change copyInheritedProperties' signature in order to say "but skip basedir" because it would break PropertyHelper's public API (and this is an explicit extension point). At the same time PropertyHelper doesn't provide an API to iterate over inherited properties so we can't emulate copy... from within the Ant task. Right now I see these options: * break the PropertyHelper API (we may have already done so for 1.8.0, I'm not sure) * break ProjectHelper's API so we can tell it to ignore the basedir property and read the attribute - yet another explicit extension point of Ant. * Have the Ant task peek into the build file and read the basedir attribute itself - and perform the same logic of ProjectHelper2. I don't like either approach. Any other idea? Not making basedir an inherited property while still retaining the (sometimes strange but documented) behaviour of <ant> doesn't look attractive either. Stefan --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
