On 2/13/2012 2:55 PM, Jesse Glick wrote:
On 02/13/2012 01:25 PM, Bruce Atherton wrote:
could Java 7 and NIO 2.0 be a good reason to create Ant 2.0?
While the new java.nio.file.* APIs are indeed valuable for a tool like
Ant, I hardly think a fork or major rewrite is required to take
advantage of them. As Stefan pointed out, it would be as easy as
creating a new FileUtils subclass, and for now compiling it conditionally.
Required, no. If there is not enough interest in creating an Ant 2 then
everything will be fine staying with Ant 1.x. We've been doing it
through massive changes in the Java libraries and we can keep doing it
the same way. If there aren't enough people interested in doing the work
then we should just drop it.
But I've talked about a few of the advantages I see in dropping backward
API compatibility and doing a major refactoring. Let me list a few more.
My biggest problem with Ant is the many ways that files are dealt with.
It is all over the map. This isn't anyone's fault, it happened because
of hysterical porpoises, but both our users and ourselves have to deal
with the fallout.
Users have to deal with understanding the differences between paths and
filelists and filesets and dirsets and resources. They have to come to
grips with how <include> and <exclude> don't work like selectors.
Filters aren't much better since there are different ways that they can
work.
We have it a bit easier because under the covers most things have been
normalized. Resources, for example. But thanks to API compatibility that
brings its own problems. For example, we have two completely separate
yet very similar set of classes for Selectors, one for FileSelectors and
one for ResourceSelectors. Fix a bug in one, did you remember to fix it
in the other? Does it matter if users of the FileSelector APIs still
have the bug?
Or look at the utility classes. How many methods, or lines of extra code
in methods that should be relatively simple, are devoted to dealing with
edge cases and these hangers on from our past?
All of these things were an itch bad enough that I started to scratch
it, but for now I won't be doing any coding at all for a while. Maybe,
though, there are others who are as bothered by these things as I am who
are looking for a scratching post.
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