Replying to myself ;-) On Thursday 01 May 2003 09:55, peter reilly wrote: > > The concept was introduced in the ant lib proposal. > > I propose to add it to Definer (and hence to typedef and taskdef). This > is to allow the use-case of optional tasks. Currently all the types/tasks > in ant core are in-fact optional, in that if they cannot be loaded, ant > proceeds as normal. This was done to allow optional tasks to be defined > (script etc), but the side effect is that all the tasks are optional. > > This feature does not exist with thirdparty ant extensions. For example > if ant-contrib wanted to add new tasks depending on bsf.jar, > users of ant-contrib.jar would need to have bsf.jar (or taskdef the > optional tasks indivually).
Looking at costin's explaination of ComponentHelper http://www.webweavertech.com/costin/archives/cat_ant.html this may not be necessary. Or the fail/warn value of onerror could load the class at definition time and the ignore value could delay the loading until tag resolution time. As a side issue, I am a bit concerned about the startup time of ant slowing down as a result of processing an xml file at startup. Peter
