Peter Donald wrote:
>
> At 10:55 6/5/01 -0400, Geir Magnusson Jr. wrote:
> >The issue I have with ant ... inappropriate for something
> >that should be able to be used as an installer and build
> >bootstrapper as well.
>
> I am curious - why do you think that?
Mostly that horrible rumor that it has to be 'installed'. A long time
ago, when we starting discussing how commons project infrastructure
might be organized, I was advocating keeping basic, framework components
in CVS, such as ant for building and velocity for anakia, so you could
download the project and just 'fire away' if you were a new user or a
wandering consultant that tends to download things a lot.
There were several reasons given why this was bad - the best was sam's
(and craig's and others) valid concern about static version binding, but
my intent was never to do the functional dependencies this way, just the
'framework' dependencies - stuff needed to build.
The one that stuck out though was that it was mentioned that it is
intended that Ant is *installed*, rather than just tossing ant.jar into
the classpath and using it.
I said then, and I say again, that I thought it was a horrible idea -
ant is such a useful and beautiful thing, that caging it like that is
just wrong :) Embedded make! it's great!
I was going to try and lobby the ant community about this, but never had
the time.
>
> >Coming from a non-Java background, one of the things that fills me with
> >rapturous joy about Java is the portable bytecode idea - it's so easy to
> >just use stuff... I love that... I don't want to *install* anything if
> >I don't have to, and expecially don't want to depend upon environment
> >variables if I don't have to. Yech.
>
> In Ant2 unless you live on the foul monstrosity of an OS Win9x you wont
> have to worry about env vars (though you already don't have to worry about
> them if you are on NT/unix).
Friends don't let friends use win9x.
> >I'm not sure about that, because if you are using this, and we make it
> >trustworthy, you know what's going to happen. I think the CLASSPATH
> >idea leads to more wonderment and mystery over where classes come from.
> >I avoid the environmental CLASSPATH at all costs if I can, and if not,
> >am very careful.
>
> Worse - much much much worse is the ext dirs. Silent unnanounced additions
> to CLASSPATH ... *shudder*
yep.
>
> >I think "most java devlopers have started to use ant" is a very long
> >stretch, IMHO.
>
> I would modify that to most java developers who don't use an IDE use ant -
> would you agree with that?
>
I don't know. I would agree that in my experience that's certainly
true, but hesitate to extend my limited experience to a statement about
a group so large.
geir
--
Geir Magnusson Jr. [EMAIL PROTECTED]
System and Software Consulting
Developing for the web? See http://jakarta.apache.org/velocity/
"still climbing up to the shoulders..."
