Berin,
Its a good idea. We've just implemented referencable datatypes in NAnt so adding a path datatype shouldn't be too hard. Looking at the description of <path> in the O'Reilly Ant book I see it can contain either:
nested <pathelement> elements
nested <fileset> elements or
nested <path> elments
this seems a tad complicated - are there valid use-cases for all these forms or are there historical reasons for maintaining them all ?
in your <csc> example given below you would still need to list the references explicitly - thats just the way the .net compilers work. A nested path element would be useful though - the equivalent of vs.net's references-path property.
Essentially, the use cases come down to the following common ones:
<pathelement/>
A specific libarary identified by a property:
<pathelement href="${nunit.dll}"/>
These libraries are typically installed in a particular location and can be overriden by a users set of properties in a .ant.properties file in their home directory. In the .NET world, I am not sure how much this really translates to real world use.
<fileset/>
This should be self explanatory. Typically, a set of libraries would live in a specific directory. In the NAnt examples I have seen, this directory is usually called "bin/", but in Ant based projects it is usually called "lib/". This is most often used.
<path/>
This is for different sets of paths to make things work properly according to what is needed at the time. For example, it is common to need one set of libraries for compilation, and another set for tests that include the first set. Most importantly, this comes into play when we have libraries we just compiled so that we can include them in the path to be tested.
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