> >>unless java does the VMS filespec generation
> >>
> > 
> > 
> > That's another possibility.  But in that case the VMS 
> specific code wouldn't
> > only be inside oat.ant.taskdefs.Execute, but also in <exec> 
> and <arg>.
> > Worse yet, this translation isn't really trivial either.  
> The JVM has to do
> > it somewhere, but that function isn't exposed for reuse inside Java.
> 
> Is its location known for reflection abuse? Otherwise we 
> reimplement it 
> in FileUtils...the latter gives one the option of generating 
> VMS paths 
> in ant for other purposes.
> 

Nothing available for reflection either.  It seeems to be entirely handled
by the VM implementation.

> I am much more strongly in favour of having the conversion 
> code in java 
> rather than in some string we pump out to a COM file. At the 
> very least, 
> it lets us have a junit test to verify the conversion works.
> 
> 

Sounds reasonable.  I'll take a look at FileUtils.

A related issue: If a VMS application takes several files (or something
else) as arguments, the arguments are separated by comma.  So for instance
the SEARCH application has the following synopsis:

        SEARCH  filespec[,...] search-string[,...]

It will actually search all the files for all specified strings.  Not that
this particular application matters, but the question is whether <apply>
should know to separate by comma instead of space on VMS.  Then again, tools
from the Unix/Windows world, like javac, still expect the file arguments to
be separated by space...

> > 
> > 
> >>>3. would be about to make Ant VMS compatible in general.
> >>
> >>could you re-use the perl scripts?
> >>
> > 
> > 
> > You're talking about runant.pl to invoke Ant, right?  Yes, 
> that or also
> > runant.py should work on VMS.  I noted that the CVS HEAD of 
> those still use
> > oat.ant.Main instead of oat.ant.launch.Launcher, as ant.bat 
> and ant do.
> 
> time for an update. Ant on netware uses the perl script BTW, and with 
> the fewer lauchers we have, the easier it is to support.
> 

OK.  People could also just run 'java -Dant.home=... org.apache...' if they
haven't Perl or Python installed.

> > 
> > But there's no build.pl and bootstrap.pl, but I supose it's 
> not really
> > necessary to be able to build Ant on VMS.
> 
> Not unless you want to run the nightly gump on VMS...
> 

:-)  No, it's just now when I want to run the unit tests on VMS.  But with a
recent enough binary distribution of Ant I should be able tu run the unit
tests.

--
knut

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