On Jan 11, 2008 9:55 AM, Gilles Scokart <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > 2008/1/10, Dominique Devienne <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > > > > > > it was successful enough to still be in use today more than 2 years > > after I'm gone, mostly untouched. > > > > > I think this is very usual. Once a build system is ok, no-one want to > take > the risk to change it, and often no-one can change it anymore. > > This is why black magic should be avoided. And this is why good > documentation techniques are required. > > If you have ever maintained a generic build script written by someone else > you probably understand what I mean. > > I think this is the major challenge in the build managment today. And > that > will be the challenge for such a project.
Agreed. IMO this is a challenge for any system. A good answer to this tough problem is usually documentation and modularity. Modularity let divide the tough problem is smaller parts, easier to understand and to maintain. I see many Ant based build systems which are unmaintainable just because they aren't modular and have a lot of duplicate code. So I think we should try to make the build system modular, and the Ant import system already help, even though some limitations make some things difficult as Dominique pointed out. Another advantage of such a system over purely home made systems is that you share knowledge of the system architecture over a community. So even if we don't manage to make a system easy to understand, it will probably be easier to maintain for users just because they can ask question about how the system is built to the community who built it or is maintaining it. Xavier > > > -- > Gilles Scokart > -- Xavier Hanin - Independent Java Consultant http://xhab.blogspot.com/ http://ant.apache.org/ivy/ http://www.xoocode.org/
