It has but not for quite a long time. Look in the archives from 2001 to
2003 for "Mutant"[1] which Conor proposed, and "Myrmidon"[2] which
Peter Donald proposed back in 2000. You can still find them in the svn
repository[3], [4].
I think there was so much discussion on a new design of Ant that
everyone just got exhausted talking about it. As I recall what finally
brought it to a halt was Costin Manolache saying "Just refactor what you
have while retaining backward compatibility."
The general agreements that I remember, although I haven't trawled the
mailing list to find references, were that backward binary compatibility
could only be broken through an Ant 2.0 release, and that Ant 2.0 should
do everything in its power to be build file compatible. The thinking
then was an XSLT file could be provided if necessary although at this
point I think we could provide an <upgrade-buildfile> task even if it
just ran an XSLT, should that prove necessary. But I don't think it
should be required if possible, at least not for several minor releases.
This is a new group of Ant developers, though, and they may make
different decisions than the ones back then did. If we find volunteers
willing to step forward to help with the code. I can do the
infrastructure things like setting up a place to put everything in
subversion, perhaps in ant/sandbox/{some code name}. Any suggestions?
All I can think of is pezant or something similarly punny. It could just
be ant2proposal.
As for whether it is a runtime issue, as far as I know the only problem
with libraries is the bootstrap build. If Ant 2's bootstrap build is
done by Ant 1 there is no problem with adding any libraries you want to
the core of Ant 2. If it is self-hosted then Ant 2 needs to be capable
of running without any external libraries.
This is why the Ant 1.x codebase has a Java tar and zip and bzip2
implementation hosted within it, even though Apache Commons has superior
implementations of all of them. Ant source is distributed in these
formats so Ant needs a bootstrap way to get at it. Stefan maintains the
compress AntLib for exactly this reason, so Ant can have access to a
really good, full featured compression library.
[1] http://marc.info/?l=ant-dev&m=98934355711364&w=2
[2] http://marc.info/?l=ant-dev&m=97593652718829&w=2
[3]
http://svn.apache.org/viewvc/ant/core/tags/ANT_152_FINAL/proposal/mutant/
[4] http://svn.apache.org/viewvc/ant/core/tags/ANT_141/proposal/myrmidon/
On 2/13/2012 1:30 PM, Mansour Al Akeel wrote:
interesting info. It looks like the idea of the redesign has been discussed
a lot in the past.
Another good point, is to have ant independent of any external libraries.
However, I am wondering if this applies to run time environment ?
For example, writing a core ant (mainly build.xml parser), as an osgi
bundle. And collection of bundles for Javac, Java, Copy,... etc. would:
1- be independent of any external libraries and relies on JRE to build.
2- allow integration with IDEs.
3- allow to compile and build the build system, without a build system (ie,
using bootstrap). or like you said "self-building".
Would this be acceptable idea ? A core bundle, and extra bundles for basic
tasks. A bundle for ivy (maybe). We can even have a bundle to install
additional bundles remotely....
And with Java7 NIO the performance will be fine.
comments ?
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