<switch value="${project.type}"> <case value="jar"> <package-jar /> </case> .. <case value="ear"> <package-ear /> </case> </switch>Having a "run-macro" around I could shorten things to simply write <run-macro name="package-${project.type}" />
Indeed, that's what I had in mind by hidden conditional. That's one way to do it, but probably not one of the Ant ways. For example, the above could be replaced by a single empty-target depending on the 4 possible package-* targets, each with an appropriate 'if' attribute. Or with a <antcall> (limited use of <antcall> is usually not that expensive). I so think you are working a bit "against the grain" with Ant here ;-)
Another thing that strikes me is the distinction between a target and a task and macrodef. It's rather easy to implement a task executing an arbitrary target using getProject().executeTarget().
Sure, that's the safe <antcall> in Ant, or the less safe <runtarget> in Ant-Contrib.
Why not providing the same functionality for a macro as well? Honestly, I regard a target nothing more than a "public" macro, i.e. a macro able to call from the command line.
That's because you think of them in procedural term. When a target as dependencies, it's not the same ball game. In theory, the dependencies of a target should be only the pre-requisite of the target, and not an ordered list of steps to fun before, and then the Ant engine would be allowed to order the execution of theses target anyway it likes (possibly parallelizing them) as long the the pre-requisites are met. There's even an Executor proposal to behave that way. Sure, it's not the way Ant works, or will ever work in all likelyhood, but that's way I think it's wrong to think of targets as "public" macros. It's similar to how an XSLT engine processes it's templates. Most processors are still mostly procedural right now, but the design allows the engine to work in a non-procedural way (Read Dr. Kay's excellent books for more details). That said, feel free to implement a <macrocall> or <runmacro> task ;-) --DD --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
