On 15 November 2010 10:25, John Tamplin <[email protected]> wrote: > On Mon, Nov 15, 2010 at 1:08 PM, Hilco Wijbenga > <[email protected]> wrote: >> On a side note, I'm not clear why we can't mandate a particular Ant >> version. Ant 1.8.1 still works with JDK1.4 so no issues there. It's a >> best practice to provide the tools with the build where possible so we >> could even do that. Even if people would want to run an older Ant, >> they could still use GWT's Ant (whatever version it might be) for >> their GWT code (i.e. their Ant build could call a separate Ant build >> for the GWT parts). Why do we need to support older Ants? It's not >> like GWT works with JDK1.4. > > Especially on Linux distros, many of the ones still in regular use > don't have newer ants available by default. If there is a good reason > to require an upgrade we can do that, but absent a good reason we > shouldn't require manually installing packages on those distros.
I realise we've gone off on a bit of a tangent here but I'd love to know which Linux distro(s) you're talking about. Even Debian Lenny (i.e. stable) comes with 1.7. Besides, it's not like Ant is something that gets installed by default so anyone who does install it will do so because they need it. They are far more likely to go with the latest. Regardless, coming back to best practices, Ant should be part of the GWT release. If we're really worried about older Ants, then allow the build to be kicked off by any Ant and then have it use GWT's Ant (internally) to actually do the build. That gives us the best of both worlds: a reproducible build that works with any Ant. -- http://groups.google.com/group/Google-Web-Toolkit-Contributors
