On Tue, 04 Nov 2003, Steve Loughran <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Here is the offending page from Brent's book.
I stumbled over it yesterday[1] - the snippet you post - here <http://www.dotnetguru.org/articles/pdc2003/pdc2003v2.htm>.
As I don't speak french I've been unable to understand the context - I was planing to ask the author of that article to translate it for me and then answer it as well.
Stefan. I am disappointed. I thought it was us british citizens that were meant to be brought up not speaking the languages of our neighbours :(. Still, I guess English does make more sense as a second language than, say, Russian, to name one of the languages I was nominally taught.
Here goes then, bearing in mind I havent spoken french since '99 and my language skills there were mainly focused around safety warnings to do with antimatter and radiation "Danger, risque de radiation", bicicyle parts and telling french girls that I am very interested in what they have to say...
The author says that it was a 1h15 presentation about Ant. It was clearly apparent that MS build is a good copy of Ant and also Nant.
If the two speakers had started their talk by acknowledging that they supported the efforts of the NAnt community and that they participated in the development of the framework, they could still [equally] have justified their decision to completely rewrite it for the reasons listed below.
concerning the techicanl details, the notion of Target is the same. Tasks are an equally integral part of the project. The plagiarism (sorry to use the term, but it is clearly the case) goes up to the API in the naming of the tasks, and the manner of using the properties [maybe attributes] is absolutely identical. But where are the differences, you ask me? Well, the developers had the idea to add functionality that is not in Ant to date. This is all explained the book "Introducing Longhorn" that was distributed free to participants during the conference
[the bogus claims reprinted]
We leave you to form your own opinion on the subject. The positive side is that an Ant developer [user?] will not be really, but also really, not lost with MsBuild.
[I havent been able to really translate that last sentence. I would guess it means that an ant user will feel at home with MSBuild]
Let me add to your comments.
1. Ant does not provide built-in target dependency analysis -a requirement for a scalable build system
<http://stefanbodewig.blogger.de/stories/10575/>
And your case where name mangling is more difficult than the current engine knows is a good point as well. We have a similar case in <rmic>, where the Weblogic compiler adapter produces a different result from Sun's.
And then there is the case of dependencies between classes. If superclass and subclass end up in different assemblies and you change the superclass, the naive target dependency analysis will not recompile the subclass. And people will never think of doing something like the <depend> task as this is done by MSBuild.
no. I think that is why they arent going to do C++ support; if you have to list dependencies by hand, stick to automake. Oh, wait, they dont support that, do they.
3. Ant does not have a normalized concept of task inputs and outputs; a necessity for a build system to support intra-task communication.
We do have references, we just don't use them as much as we could <http://stefanbodewig.blogger.de/stories/10636/>.
I'm trying to get my thoughts on this into a better shape and will have a proposal for the 1.7 timeframe.
This sounds interesting.
4. Unlike Ant, MSbuild is a secure build engine. MSBuild introduces the notion of partially trusted builds, project level sandboxing and task level sandboxing.
I couldn't find anything about this in the public docs about MSBuild.
me neither. Which is why this smacks of a briefing rather than brent doing his own research.
>>5. MSbuild has a richer extensibility model than ant. > > > I was laughing out loud on reading this.
yes, I thought maybe it was a typo. You dont get more extensible than having no schema and the complete source to play with.
> > >>6. Ant does not have the ability to import (macro insert) parts of >>the project file > > > It is fair to say that this is true for all released versions of Ant > (so let's get 1.6 out of door quickly ;-). And only if you deny > entities, of course.
yes, but MSBuild is a year from shipping. They should really be comparing msbuild to Ant1.7 release; for now 1.6 vs MSBuild beta is the best comparision.
>>What are we going to do now. I am feeling ruthless. > > > Wait until it apperas in MSDN to address it? Address it right now? > Judging from my blog's referers, people are searching for infomation > on MSBuild a lot ATM, so we may as well set the record straight right > from the beginning.
no, we are going to our retaliation in early, as they say in rugby. I will send some emails to the relevant authorities. One nice thing about MS compared to Sun is that they are very easily contacted, and usually pretty responsive. If they dont respond, that is when you have to worry. It usually means they dont want to tell you something bad.
now, they dont have to care what I say, but we do have the option of pulling all .NET support from ant1.6...we will just have to see if that matters to them. It'll be an interesting test of conflict of the tactical 'get .net developers today' over the strategic 'own the developers forever'.
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