Matt Benson wrote:
--- Rick Moynihan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
So my questions to the ant community:
* What is commons launcher doing that ANT alone
isnt?
Personally I havent heard from commons-launcher
before. As you said it
seems
that commons-launcher is a modified copy of
ant-launcher. So the best
place
to ask this would be (IMHO) the [EMAIL PROTECTED] list.
I have already made inquiries on the
user/[EMAIL PROTECTED] lists, and I have
also tried contacting the project developers
directly. Unfortunately I
have had little response, which I why I feel that
perhaps there is some
interest within the ANT community. Hence my posting
here.
I haven't noticed your inquiries, but I follow those
lists. I have recently become a Jakarta committer,
and it is my intention to try to become more involved
with commons development, especially with regard to
components forked from Ant (e.g. exec). So I would
encourage you to post JIRA issues and nag commons-dev
for attention. Launcher is counted among commons
proper, but if there is little attention to it it's
probably considered to be in maintenance mode.
HTH,
Matt
Thanks for responding. Here's a link to a short thread of discussion I
started on the commons-dev list.
http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/jakarta-commons-dev/200702.mbox/[EMAIL
PROTECTED]
I am still open to the shepherding process, and the nagging etc it
entails :). I have decided to follow the issue up here primarily
because I wonder why these features could not also be part of ANT? I
also think that commons-launcher has a large potential community of
users within the larger ANT community.
What does maintenance-mode mean? I'm guessing it means that the bugs
against it aren't fixed, but that the source is still integrated with
Apache's continuous integration/build-system and maintained (in so far
as ensuring it always builds). Is this correct?
Thanks again,
R.
* Can ANT be used as a launch process for Java
processes/daemons without significant problems?
The ant-launcher is implemented in the package
oata.launch [1]. It was
designed
as a replacement to the very heavy start scripts
(bat,sh...). So it
focused on
Ant's needs.
The launcher [2] does not start any new process -
it uses the current
one. So I dont think that you can launch
processes/deamons with the
launcher. BUT: maybe a buildfile with
<exec>/<java> and fork="true"
would help.
As this is beyond Ant's focus I would not say that
there are no
significant problems. But _maybe_ it works ;-)
Thanks for the code pointers. I'll be sure to take
a look at them.
* Is there any interest within the ANT community
to support this
use-case natively within ANT?
Mmmh - there was a discussion earlier. The only
future I would see is a
base or utility class without any Ant specific
stuff in ant-launcher
which could be reused in Ant's own launcher. I
think that was the
intention in commons-launcher.
But Ant does not want to depend on a 3rd party
library in that core
area. Have in mind: 400+ projects are using Ant
for their bootstrapping
just in Gump ... And having a circular dependency
between Ant and
commons-launcher is also not a good thing ...
Obviously I understand that ANT is a critically
important piece of
infrastructure for a huge number of projects, and I
understand that
ANT's primary focus is and always will be as a build
tool.
My only point is that *MAYBE* if it is not too much
work, ANT can be
adapted to also fill this role. I have looked at
other projects such as:
* http://classworlds.codehaus.org/launchusage.html
*
http://wrapper.tanukisoftware.org/doc/english/introduction.html
However I personally feel that reusing ANT build
files for this sort of
thing is a more elegant solution, as it can leverage
knowledge of ANT
for configuration of classpaths, properties, etc...
*If* the ant-launcher could be modified to support
this use-case without
any external dependencies etc, I feel it would
nicely fill a need in the
Java community. Obviously adopting ANT to a task it
was not designed
for is not a decision that should be taken lightly,
but I feel it would
be valuable, and can't see why it should impact
ANT's use as a build tool.
At the end of the day, I like commons launcher and
would be completely
happy with it, if it had a community behind it,
willing to fix the few
bugs I have encountered and drive some more
features.
So, my current options appear to be either:
1. Suggest the ANT project adopts the use-case of an
application launcher.
2. Patch commons-launcher myself (which I may well
do) and persuade the
project maintainers to accept my patches (unlikely
given the projects
lack of developers/community).
3. Fork commons-launcher and maintain it outside of
Apache.
The first suggestion is the lowest cost to me, as it
means others can
maintain, run and manage the project. I appreciate
that many factors
are likely to prevent this. If ANT can be modified
in the manner you
suggest, what are the barriers?
The other two options require a significant
investment of my (and
hopefully others) time.
What does the ANT community think?
R.
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