Steve Loughran wrote:
really appreciate the time you have taken to answer.....even where you have confirmed simply lets me know if something is considered optional, must do, or a bit of cruft in the source.James Fuller wrote:
btw I have a few general developer questions... before I start caning bugzilla I think any responses would be well appreciated;
This makes some sense, apart from the schema bit at the bottom. Schema? We dont need no schema :)
schema can be an opt in, admittedly writing a schema would give hints to editors out there...by using NRL (namespace routing language) we can allow authors to use whatever schema lang they prefer (my own choice is RELAXNG). Also through namespace declaration we can let authors use whatever markup they choose for descriptive blocks (xhtml, etc).
XSD is misguided and evil. Its type model doesnt match an object model in any OO language, and it is a nightmare to code in. RelaxNG is an alternative. We have <antdtd>; <antrelaxng> could dynamically do a relax schema.
- getlibraries has no task definition that I can see....correct me if I am wrong
<libraries>
yes, was looking for manual description of the task.
note the mention of that fact in the Ant1.7 todo list. I'd autogenerate one, but a lot of the fun comes from nested stuff, and the existing xdoclet doesnt do any coverage of nested things.
which reminds me, xdoclet-based docs need to cover datatypes and nested elements.
- couldnt find any logging/listener tests under testcases ?
sacre!
I know. naughty. A lot of ant core lacks explicit tests, you have to write them before you make any changes, however. The reason: ant core predates junit and <junit>.
- any update on webdav task
We arent doing one.
ok, this looks like a nice first submission for me then.
maybe, but the best place for it is next to the webdav code. Assuming that is slide, that is where it should live. Makes versioning easier.
We cant move things. If you move stuff, you have to leave a facade class there. Why? Because we dont know who has subclassed or reused a class. A lot of people use ant programatically as well as in the XML layer, and we need to keep the effective API as stable as the XML language. This is precisely why we are org.apache.tools.Ant
agree, but there are a few techniques instead of just putting facade classes...I agree with the statement you make later about backwards compatibility...
Launcher is special; it is its own JAR file, and has to locate and launch ant proper. it must be 100% self-contained.
ok, thought this was the case.
Why not move ?
-main/org/apache/tools/bzip
-main/org/apache/tools/bzip2
-main/org/apache/tools/mail
-main/org/apache/tools/tar
-main/org/apache/tools/zip
excuse my ignorance here (well if u never ask questions...)....are these are org.apache.tools packages used by other apache projects
I think they did come from other projects, and are designed for reuse outside ant.
was wondering if there is a more appropriate apache project for these org.apache.tools.* packages....
Well, they are all the generic tools stuff, 'utils' is the only other name that woudl make sense.
- why are these tests at toplevel ? testcases/org/apache/tools/mail testcases/org/apache/tools/tar testcases/org/apache/tools/zip
maybe because the things they test are at that level.
hehe, this is linked to why we have such top level packages...once again history.
yes, there is lot of historical stuff. Eventually we will be crushed by the weight of backwards compatiblity.
I have just updated the ant_task_guidelines doc in the repository, please take a look at this and see if it clarifies things.
thx for taking the time to answer such tiresome questions....
no, it is good to ask. if you dont, then you dont learn.
One thing that would be really good in the short term (1.7 release) could be machine generated (xdoclet) docs. We need
-good coverage of nested elements, datatypes
-ability to provide as much info as the handwritten
-good generated HTML/PDF docs
-reuse of the generated XML by IDEs, if they so choose.
-reusable by third party projects. There are two projects I'm involved in that do use the existing xdoclet stuff, but it is pretty brittle and hard coded to ant's own project.
The other thing about doc improvements is that docs dont freeze until the ship date...
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