Currently we run a batch file based build process, extended with some perl scripts, to build 240 VC++ and 20 C# components
We will be converting the whole lot to C# in the near future, so I have been investigating NANT as an alternative build for our 20 C# projects:
It was easy to port most of our existing functionality, and NANT is much quicker to build the C# components. Top stuff.
It was easy to get the hang of the XML scripts/variables which drive NANT.
Obviously a lot of thought and hard work has gone into NANT, and one of its neatest fetaures is the way you can customise it
All in all it gets my vote, and I will mothball my NANT port until we convert all our source, when it will eventually be running up to 12 nightly builds
However there are one or two niggles which I may get round to offering on NANTContrib, but I thought I should
check first in case I have done something stupid or missed something in the docs (not for the first time, either :-) )
1. Apart from the <if and <ifnot conditions, I could not find any 'else'. Thus my buildfiles have <if conditions followed by <ifnot which
makes them clumsy to read. Have I missed an 'else' or is there another way if linking both sides of an 'if' condition ?
2. A simple _expression_ that would be great to have would be a 'files::different'
I'm not sure what the files::up-to-date _expression_ does, but I don't think it is 'are these two files the same, or not?'
3. Is there any way of NOT putting all the compile warnings from the solution task into the ordinary build output. A couple of our
components have pages of these warnings (not good practice, I admit) but they do give a huge build output
4. Are there any plans for extending the solution task so that it can take a .csproj or .vcproj file ? I have had to create solution files
for all the proejcts I want to build with NANT - we don't keep them under source control so it doesn't matter if the developers
hack around with them, so all of my solution files are just a wrapper to one project file.
As I say, if these are genuinely not present I may get round to submitting them,
but if I have missed existing features could someone give me some pointers ?
Thanks very much for a great product, and thanks in advance for replies and responses
Simon
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