Hello all, I submitted a patch recently on Ant's bugzilla, and I'd like to discuss it here in the list.
The initial idea would be to add a command line parameter (-loop) to ant, so it can run in loop mode. In this mode, once the tasks are finished, ant will wait for the user to press Enter to run the tasks again or q to quit (similar to incremental compilation on Jikes). That would be pretty useful in situations where a task must be performed many times in a short period of time - like redeploying modified JSP pages to a web container: usually these task itself is almost instantaneous, but it takes about 5-6 seconds using the regular ant due to the overhead caused by the JVM invocation. With this patch, the new tasks are executed really fast, as shown below: ant -loop copy_web_oc4j Buildfile: build.xml copy_web_oc4j: [copy] Copying 1 file to /home/felipeal/eInquiry/build/deploy/oc4j/CSNAPP BUILD SUCCESSFUL Total time: 2 seconds // first evocation, took 2 seconds Press Enter to continue or q + Enter to quit copy_web_oc4j: [copy] Copying 1 file to /home/felipeal/eInquiry/build/deploy/oc4j/CSNAPP BUILD SUCCESSFUL Total time: 0 seconds // sub-sequent iterations: 0 seconds Press Enter to continue or q + Enter to quit I submitted a first patch yesterday (even though we'been been using it internally in my company for a couple of days) and talked with Antoine in private, and he pointed a valid issue: the patch was too simplistic. For instance, how would an IDE handle the System.in calls? So, even though most IDEs call ant in a particular way, I improved the patch a little bit: now the Main class has 2 new attributes, loopMode and loopHandler, which could be set by the IDEs. LoopHandler is a new interface, whose default implementation uses System.in.read(). So, what do you guys think of the patch? I think it would be really useful, and easy to implement (of course, if I didn't think so I wouldn't suggest it :-). If it is accepted, I could offer more help documenting and testing it (personally and with the participation of folks at my company and JUG). Regards, Felipe PS: here is the enhancement's URL: http://nagoya.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=22428 --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]