After a straw poll amongst people prepared to voice their opinions (a nicely self-selecting group :-), the general view seemed to be that people wanted to see both Gant and Gradle exist, at least in the medium term, and not for Gant to be closed down in favour of Gradle being the only Groovy-based build offering. Although Gradle is a much better overall build framework than Gant -- it is DAG-based, rather than execution-based, and has integrated dependency management, via Ivy, and a whole host of other project support goodness -- people felt that having a very lightweight Ant scripting system was something valuable and to be retained. Although in the future (once it has been more modularized) Gradle will be able to fulfil this lightweight scripting role, for the moment this is what Gant offers, and though I say it myself, I think it does it rather well.
Why am I emailing with this philosophizing? Well it is really a manifesto regarding future development of Gant. Future bug reports for Gant are going to be assessed in the light of Gant being an Ant task scripting system and Gradle being a fully-fledged build system. Clearly there is a lot of overlap in these aims and goals, so this is all various shades of grey (no black and white), but where a Gant JIRA issue is really about trying to evolve Gant to be a fully fledged build system, the response is likely to be "Isn't Gradle what you are looking for?". Where a Gant JIRA issue is about Gant as Ant task scripting system then code will be changed and new versions of Gant released, i.e. FOSS-project business as usual. Gant is now using Bazaar for development so you don't have to be a Subversion committer to take a branch and hack on Gant. We are using Launchpad as a way of managing development branches -- at least while Codehaus isn't supporting Bazaar. The Codehaus Subversion repository remains the mainline, but it contains complete Bazaar branches, its not just a Subversion repository. Hopefully all this makes sense and seems reasonable. Can I propose that any responses / follow ups occur solely on the Gant Users list -- I have given this notice super-wide circulation, but any ongoing exchanges need to be focused in one place. Thanks. -- Russel. ==================================================== Dr Russel Winder Partner Concertant LLP t: +44 20 7585 2200, +44 20 7193 9203 41 Buckmaster Road, f: +44 8700 516 084 London SW11 1EN, UK. m: +44 7770 465 077
signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part
