----- Original Message -----
From: "Scott Sanders" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "jakarta-commons" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Tuesday, May 01, 2001 5:33 PM
Subject: Sandbox for Wayward Ant Tasks
> Does anyone have a problem with me creating a sandbox directory for
> wayward Ant Tasks that have either not yet made it into Ant CVS or are
> too specific for that purpose?
>
> Right now I have 2, one called xpath, that will eventually get and set
> values to and from an xml file, and the other one is called xmlfilelist,
> which takes a filter of files and then spits them out in xml to be used
> by anther process (XSLT).
>
> The xpath task was contributed for my needs of AntGump at alexandria,
> but it has been discussed on ant-dev and was thought to be either:
> a) merged with the replace task as it only sets values right now
> or
> b) I suggested that I expand the functionality to do more than set.
>
> I am working on b), but I also know that there are many 'wayward' Ant
> tasks that don't quite make it to the big time, but are useful.
>
> With that, are there any objections to the Aphid directory in the sandbox?
>
I am very interested in having a repository of "wayward" Ant task as I think
that is what is missing from Ant. A lot of persons are eager to contribute
tasks but these tasks seem to get lost on the mailing list and never reach
any kind of repository where there could be stored and described for users.
For example: on Alexandria project, there is the CVS log task which could be
very useful to lots of persons, in Cactus, there is a task to automatically
start and stop servers that could also be useful to some, ...
The question is where do we store these tasks ? I'm not sure the
jakarta-commons is the correct place. It seems to me that it would be better
if it were linked to the Ant project itself. However, if the goal is to
develop the idea of this repository and just make an experiment so that
later on the Ant project could reclaim it, then why not. But I am not in
favor of moving it to the commons later because I think it fits better with
the Ant project.
Also, if we want this to be successful, we need to have the cooperation of
the Ant committers so that they redirect all persons submitting Ant tasks to
the sandbox. And they will also need to advertise the sandbox on the Ant web
site so that persons know where to find contributed Ant tasks. I still
persist in saying that a CVS sub directory in Ant would still be better than
the sandbox because more appropriate.
But I am +10000 with the idea of having a repository of wayward tasks for
Ant. The only question is where ?
> Scott Sanders
>
Vincent Massol.
