Steve Loughran wrote:
Phil Weighill-Smith wrote:
I missed the beginning of this thread but just want to say that I personally think that import is the best feature in Ant today (apart from Ant's being in the first place, that is)!
I find it hard to work with in a big project.
problems
-risk of adding a new target in an imported build file conflicting with one in the importer (i.e. lack of private scope)
>
-when you override a target, you dont get access to its dependents. Workaround: many pseudo-targets that only model dependencies.
Could you please explain more? TIA
Imagine I have a base build file with a target "compile". If I overwrite it in a project, I need to manually redeclare all dependencies of the compile target
base
<target name="compile" depends="init,compile-classpath" >...</target>
extension
<target name="compile" depends="init,compile-classpath,generate" >...</target>
That is, I need to know and declare the dependencies again. If I change the dependencies of the base target, all derived files need updating. What I want to say is
<target name="compile" depends="dependencies(base.compile),generate" >...</target>
The workaround is pseudo targets
<target name="pre-compile" depends="init,compile-classpath" />
<target name="compile" depends="pre-compile" >...</target>
and then depend on the pre-compile target in derived build files
<target name="compile" depends="pre-compile,generate" >...</target>
-once you have sub-projects importing ../../common.xml, they are no longer self contained, which makes it harder to work with outside the existing build tree.
I dont see any good solution for the latter.
The first and the last "problems" are in fact worksforme, as the import task is *intended* to pollute the project files that use it to be able to work as needed.
yes, but I dont always want to pollute project files with my inner workings.
In most cases, one would want to use <typedef>, <macrodef> or <ant> instead of importing buildfiles with <target>s, which should be used only to reuse and "extend" a base buildfile.
macrodef/presetdef defines standard actions; the base buildfile defines the standard process.
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