Anderson, Kelly wrote:
If you mean "keeping a copy of the results of a build" ...
If you mean "keeping a copy of the source that went into a build" ...
If you mean "mirroring a file tree to a second location" ...
Yeah, that's a good example of what I'm talking about...
Well, yes, NAnt can do many of the things that scripting languages can
do. After all, it has variables (properties), conditionals, some fairly
primitive looping that can be hacked for more general purposes, and the
ability to call out via exec. Targets are the moral equivalent to
functions in other languages. That doesn't mean it's the best system
for all the things that scripting languages do, but there's certainly a
lot of overlap.
But these items are part of what "build" means in the general release
engineering sense. Saying that NAnt is for builds doesn't mean that it
has the same functionality as the Visual Studio "build solution"
command. It means it's useful for the systems that are commonly
maintained by release engineering groups, or the individuals in small
teams who take on that role. This includes all the record keeping, all
the interaction with the source control system, deployment over the net,
notification, archiving, etc. That's what people have been doing with
scripting languages and script-level utilities for years - including make.
Perhaps this thread started not because people just discovered that NAnt
could do more than compiling and linking, but because people didn't
realize that make can do more than compiling and linking. Or perhaps
it's because the boundaries are different - make sits between the
concept of dependency and the greater scripting environment, while NAnt
adds a facade to the scripting environment. (And I mean scripting in
the bash/Perl/Python sense, not the JavaScript sense that can be used to
extend NAnt.)
Gary
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