On Sun, 12 Nov 2000, Craig R. McClanahan wrote:
> One interesting note about your rant is that the only people who care
> about Ant in the first place are those trying to build Tomcat from
> source
> (or want to use it for their own development). If you just need a
> binary build of Tomcat (which is definitely the majority case), Ant is
> irrelevant.
True, except that to get mod_jserv (or mod_jk) to play nice with _my_
wierd apache installation I wanted to accomplish a fresh build of
everything.
> (And the particular classpath error that bit you would have shown up
> with a makefile too :-)
Again, you're right.
> Another note is a voice of personal experience. I've been doing
> primarily Java development for the last four years, and (until Ant came
> along) creating Make files that knew how to deal with Java's package
> structure correctly was always painful and error-prone. The arcane
> syntax and all the "magical" behavior is, quite frankly, a real pain.
> And it was never easy to port from the idiosyncracies of one "make" to
> another. Sure, I could have invested the time to become a "make maven",
> but expertise in this area doesn't pay the rent -- getting programs
> completed does.
I'll take "doesn't pay the rent to know that" as probably the bottom line
answer, and I'll agree. Has anyone gotten Jikes to work with ant?
> Autoconf? Well, the whole reason that autoconf exists is to make the
> fact that platforms are not compatible less painful -- but well designed
> Java
> programs don't suffer much from that. The fact that Ant runs out of the
> box on any platform with a JVM -- without having any configuration other
> than getting the classpath right -- tells me that tools like autoconf
> are no longer relevant to my life. Good riddance to them ... :-)
>
> A final note -- an increasing number of the Java based open source
> projects I'm familiar with, including many outside *.apache.org, have
> adopted Ant as their portable build tool. So I'm clearly not the only
> one who feels this way.
>
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