On Jan 10, 2008 8:25 AM, Xavier Hanin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > So, what do you think? Do you think this would be useful? Would you be > interested in contributing? Do you think a new Ant sub project would be a > good fit?
I too like Ant, and in the past worked full time on doing ad-hoc builds for many different projects which required *a lot* of customization. Quite a few projects were mixed Java and C++, and a lot of the different teams for which I was doing builds had their own way of doing things, so having a standard and uniform project structure a la Maven was not possible (and Maven is mostly Java-only, and difficult to extend IMHO). Despite this diversity, I was still regularly refactoring builds to reuse as much as possible, and even achieved a high level of reuse, where a project's build was down to a custom descriptor for the project (I was doing my own dependency stuff before Ivy came along), an import, and zero or more override targets. But the cost for this common build that was supposed to be generic enough to work with all these diverse projects was increased complexity, to the point that almost no one could customize a project's build because of the need to have a deep understanding of the common build and Ant's intricacies. For example, every target from a normal (concrete) build had to be split into 3 in the common (abstract) build, to add a pre and post "hook" target to allow customization in the concrete build. Dealing with paths and filesets was complex. I don't remember all the details (it's been 2+ years), but I clearly remember I was "fighting" Ant, and I have a lot of experience with Ant. So I guess I'm saying that I agree with you on the goal, but having tried to achieve it myself to serve the need of the builds I was managing proved quite difficult, and Ant has to come a long way still to support what you describe IMHO. Sure, I should have tried to modify Ant itself to make it easier, but that's no easy task, and life made it so that my involvement with Ant took a back step, and I'm mostly watching from afar what's going on in Ant. I've never used Ivy for example. I'd probably have replaced my dependency stuff with Ivy by now, although my stuff was C++ aware and was pulling not just jars with also C++ headers and libraries, packaged sources of dependent modules for debugging, etc... All the power to everyone that wants to achieve the goal of reusable scripts, but my own experience was quite mixed, despite the fact that it was successful enough to still be in use today more than 2 years after I'm gone, mostly untouched. I hope these words don't discourage you though! But from the energy I can read in your posts, I don't think I could ;-) Cheers, and good luck, --DD --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
