One thing that was voted on (positively, I recall), way way back in time, was for Ant2.0 to fail on undefined properties.
Having just struggled with a build file refactor that introduced the problem, a problem I only dealt with by resorting to IntelliJ's property-aware ant file editor, I am starting to think the fail-on-undefined property mechanism is good.
But at the same time, those echo statements with undefined properties are ubiquitous, and they need to stay in. And we need the option of turning strict property evaluation off or on.
My preferred way to do this would be to
1. either or both of a new command line option, a new property to set. to turn strict property evaluation on.
The nice thing about these two is that they can be applied to existing files. The property set tactic would let you use build.properties to set the flag, and enable inline in projects that will still work in ant 1.6, but get complex w/ <ant> and <antcall>
2. in strict mode, any expansion of a unknown property into a string would throw a BuildException
3. But there would be a non-throwing expansion method for code that explicitly wanted to not fail on missing strings in their .
4. <echo>, <fail> and a few others would be modified to use the new non throwing expansion mechanism.
The problem with this is that while
<echo>${undefined}</echo> would work as intended,<echo message="${undefined}" /> would always throw an exception.The only fix there would be a new datatype NonvalidatingString() that would expand properties but not bail.
Would that be enough? Would it work and be usable?
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