Status Report for the Ant project o Ant 1.5.4
Ant 1.5.4 was released on August 12th, 2003 This was a minor maintenance release of the Ant 1.5 branch. It addressed just two particular problems - the change to the javah entry point in the latest Sun JDK release and the Visual Age tasks. The latter, being only compatible with JDK 1.1, were included to give users of this task a working release prior to the Ant 1.6 release which depends on JDK 1.2+ o Ant 1.6 Beta Two betas of Ant 1.6 have been released to date. Beta 1 was released on 30th Septamber, 2003 followed by Beta 2 on October 17. Ant 1.6 has been well received as it provides a number of new features for simplifying and reusing build components. A short summary of the new features is * Delayed Task construction, Top levels tasks * Antlib - a packaging of ant components into a library * namespace support * macrodef task for composing ant tasks into larger, reusable tasks * scriptdef for building tasks from scripting languages * presetdef for defining tasks based on a specific configuration for another ant task * input management and redirection for exec and java tasks A bucketload of other fixes and changes as described here http://cvs.apache.org/dist/ant/v1.6beta2/ The betas have generated a lot of interesting discussion on the dev list in particular about the operation of macrodef and namespaces. A third beta will definitely be produced. o Legal Issues None. The PMC has received a request from Peter Donald through Stefan Bodewig for the removal of the Myrmidon codebase. The PMC will consider and I expect will go ahead and remove this module from CVS. o PMC meeting the PMC will shortly hold a virtual meeting to consider a few maintenance issues. These include the composition of the PMC, moving inactive PMC members and committers to emeritus status, etc. As previously noted, Diane Holt has indicated that she will no longer be able to act as a PMC member. We thank her for her many contributions to Ant over the years. o Community The dev list has been very active following the 1.6 beta. The discussion has been cooperative and healthy. Likewise the user list continues to be very active. Conor --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
