The idea really looks like promising. I think this feature could have a better place in ant itself (i'm adding them in copy of this email). Could you share the code of your POC somewhere with some guide line to test it? I'm pretty sure people will have ideas when they will try it. If you need a place to publish it you can use this : https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator/easyant/tasks/trunk/.
2011/5/29 Purkayastha, Siddhartha <siddhartha.purkayas...@ca.com> > Hello All - > > I wanted to discuss an idea with you about diagnostics. When considering > about diagnostics, it should comprise of a set of tools that can help me > diagnose issues I am facing with my build. Ant -diagnostics returns lots of > variables that can be valuable to resolving environment / setup issues. > > I am thinking of the possibility of a Command Line Debugger / Inspector > included within EasyAnt (or may be even Ant itself). I am not aware if such > a tool already exists. > > It could behave something like this: > I can run: > ant -breakAt=someTarget > > The breakAt parameter could indicate a breakpoint at target 'someTarget'. > The user could be interactively displayed a prompt here: > breakpoint: > [Debugger] DEBUGGER> > > Where the user could issue a set of commands to inspect the state of the > build so far. > > For example: > breakpoint: > [Debugger] DEBUGGER> inspect some.property > Property Value: HelloWorld > > The same idea could be extended to include other build factors, like paths, > imported plugins etc. It may actually be extended to become a fully featured > command line debugger, from where one can also set new property values or > override existing values (probably a relaxation of immutability for the > support of this tool) etc, do step over, step into etc. > > I did some experiments with this concept, I was able to break at a certain > target and inspect values of properties that user wants to see, using a new > target created at Runtime, with a single task that accepted user inputs from > command line, interpreted it and displayed an output - And kept on doing so > till the user typed 'return' on the prompt. I also think, as an extension - > if we can also track audit history of different properties, paths, > references etc, then this could be an effective tool. However, I do not > think it is easily achievable today. > > I am wondering about the technical feasibility and utility of such an > inbuilt tool. Can you share your thoughts on this? > > Thanks, > Siddhartha > -- Jean Louis Boudart Independent consultant Project Lead http://www.easyant.org
