I know I'm a little late to this party - I've been tied up in my new assignment. Anyway, FWIW here's my opinion:
> I've been thinking about how we could improve our diagnostics, by moving > more of the diags into tasks themselves. Every task could have a > diagnostics(PrintStream) method that would be called to do the diags. Sounds like a good idea to me; might I suggest that we add a similar capability for an entire antlib (more on this below)? > 1. we could introspect for a public static void diagnostics(PrintStream) > throws BuildException method. This would let us diagnose even if you > cannot instantiate the task enough for new() to work. I'm a little rusty on static method overrides...if A extends B, can both A and B have a static method with identical signatures? This should be easy to test, but I'm feeling lazy at the moment :) > 2. or we'd use an interface Diagnostics that things could implement Intuitively this feels like a cleaner approach to me. Admittedly you need an instance to work with, but we'd just need to document the fact that if the constructor fails you can't get any diags; it shouldn't be too hard for tasks implementing this interface to put volatile init code somewhere other than the constructor. > 3. the -diagnostics command and <diagnostics> tasks could be made to > diagnose a single task > > ant -diagnostics -task junit > > and maybe even a single antlib namespace > > ant -diagnostics -xmlns antlib:org.example.something Okay, so I see that you've considered the antlib case to a certain extent. This has me thinking about antlib auto-discovery again. Instead of requiring users to specify the task or antlib they want diags on, I think it would be easier for users to add a "-fullDiagnostics" option that would dump the normal "-diagnostics" info _plus_ whatever task/antlib diags it could find. For that to work we would need some sort of auto-discovery mechanism (which has been discussed before). I also think we could add something similar for version information; a "-fullVersion" flag could dump the normal "-version" info _plus_ version info about discovered antlibs. ____________________________________________________________________________________________ Jeffrey E. (Jeff) Care [EMAIL PROTECTED] IBM WebSphere Application Server Systems Management Development --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
