Steve Cohen wrote:
Shall the newly added FTP task revisions be incorporated into release 1.6.4?
Motivation: I understand this comes in "under the wire" and may cause justifiable trepidation among some. I still favor adding it to the release because:
1) The tasks add some important new capabilities (in order of importance):
a) the ability for the "newer" attribute to recognize timezone
differences between client and server
b) the ability to handle the "all-numeric" timestamp format that
some unixes (Debian for example) are now shipping with.
c) the ability to handle legacy systems that still use
locale-specific timestamp formatting (becoming rare but still encountered).
Documentation of the new features has also been checked in.
2) Care has been taken to avoid adding new dependency requirements to Ant. The new features require commons-net-1.4.0 and the task cannot be compiled without it, but users with an earlier version of commons-net can still use the task exactly as before. Existing scripts will function exactly as before. 3) Just to reiterate - in spite of earlier postings the the contrary, including this in release 1.6.4 WOULD NOT REQUIRE USERS TO UPGRADE COMMONS-NET. This has been tested against commons-net-1.2.2 (the previous recommended system) and all tests passed.
My vote:
-1
I dont think I've -1'd anything before, at least not in recent memory. Here is my thinking
(a) 1.6.4 is an emergency release to fix some defects that didnt show up during beta testing
Fair enough.
(b) any feature added now would go into the release without beta testing. It runs the risk of breaking.
Fair enough, although it's worth repeating that existing tests that test existing functionality do not break, either with the old commons-net lib or the new.
(c) We'd be effectively obliged to maintain the API forever. Its good to use something in a few of your own build files first to see what works, and what doesnt.
What is there about this API compared to any others that Ant is obliged to maintain that you don't like? This objection is meaningless and insulting. These features have been extensively tested in commons-net.
Commons-net is under the jakarta umbrella with an active team of developers. Meanwhile Ant "maintains" APIs adapting it to various commercial products for which it has no serious maintainers. I myself maintained the <starteam> tasks for Ant for as long as I had a job that gave me access to a StarTeam server. (late 2003).
Looking back through CVS at the entire starteam package I find one substantive change made in a year and a half (a NPE fix). There have been no enhancements, and nothing but boilerplate changes. Okay, there's probably not too much demand for those tasks and, at any rate, no one has stepped forward. But please don't put jakarta-commons-net into that bag.
If I sound a little resentful, it's because these changes were designed by me specifically with Ant in mind. I resisted suggestions from others that would have implemented these changes in fashions that were less compatible with Ant. Now this effort seems to be being treated as an unwanted intrusion.
Summary: its too new a change to push into a release that we arent going to beta test.
You should have stopped there.
Once Ant1.6.4 ships we can start the push towards Ant1.7. That is: no more 1.6 releases barring disasters with the 1.6.4 version, instead we can decide on the feature set and release schedule for the version of ant that will have this change, and bring out a beta in, say, july. Anyone who wants the new features should be pushed towards this public beta, which will help test the while release.
-steve
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