---
Ant (or make) is not a general purpose scripting language!
Mr. Bourne wrote a pretty good scripting language.
----
Yes, but sh (& friends) are not installed by default on Windows, and
hence, scripts written for them aren't portable... In make (which isn't
portable, I know), you can basically embed sh scripts, in a fairly
standard (modulo make's awkwardness regarding tabs and escaping $'s and so
on) manner. i.e. a Makefile describes the dependencies between different
processes that are used to build/deploy etc the software. Not that I like
make -- I'm just using it as a point of comparison.
So, what you're really saying here is that Ant is the wrong tool for what
I'm trying to do, and I should really be scripting it, perhaps using the
<script> task, or writing my own new task to do it... I think I
understand, but I have to say that I'm dissappointed -- mainly because it
means more work, more reading documentation, and less output for me in my
specific situation here and now. I had been hoping against hope that my
screwdriver was indeed a hammer that I was holding wrong.
Cheers,
Richard Russell
Deutsche Bank AG London
Global Markets Customer Solutions
Office: +44 (0)20 7545 8060
Mobile: +44 (0)79 0661 2237
Peter Reilly <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
10/05/2004 04:49 PM
Please respond to "Ant Users List"
To: Ant Users List <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
cc:
Subject: Re: Thinking in Ant...
Ant (or make) is not a general purpose scripting language!
Mr. Bourne wrote a pretty good scripting language.
There are a number of issues with using ant as a scripting language:
- there is no pipe like mechanism
- the tasks are not ortoginal (concat has different parameters than
copy for example)
- property imutablilty makes things difficult.
- support for looping is done via third-party addons like ant-contrib
or antxtras.
note:
- (ant-contrib's var unset=true uses reflection to get access to
private fields so it might
not work in future releases of ant)
One can extend ant by writting new tasks/types so
here is my solution to the problem:
<pr:scripttypedef name="relativefileset" language="beanshell">
import org.apache.tools.ant.types.FileSet;
import org.apache.tools.ant.ProjectComponent;
import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.Iterator;
public class RelativeFileSet extends ProjectComponent {
private ArrayList list = new ArrayList();
public void addConfigured(FileSet fileset) {
for (file :
fileset.getDirectoryScanner(getProject()).getIncludedFiles()) {
list.add(file);
}
}
public Iterator iterator() {
return list.iterator();
}
}
</pr:scripttypedef>
<property name="source.dir" location=".."/>
<property name="target.dir" location="target"/>
<mkdir dir="${target.dir}"/>
<ac:for param="file">
<relativefileset>
<fileset dir="${source.dir}" includes="**/build.xml"/>
</relativefileset>
<sequential>
<concat destfile="${targetdir}/@{file}.concatenated">
<fileset file="${source.dir}/@{file}"/>
<filterchain>
<replacetokens>
<token key="parameter" value="value"/>
</replacetokens>
</filterchain>
</concat>
</sequential>
</ac:for>
Matt Benson wrote:
>--- Richard Russell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
>
>>I tried using <for> and <var>, but found that I
>>couldn't do much with
>><var>, as it appeared that the only way I could set
>>the var was with the
>><var> task, and I needed to use functionality in
>><propertycopy> to get
>>double-redirection. I can't *quite* recall why this
>>didn't work, but it
>>didn't. If you like, I'll try to recreate what I was
>>trying to do, and see
>>if I can demonstrate the problem I had...
>>
>>
>
>Okay... my understanding of the problem was that you
>had a set of files whose contents you wanted to append
>to identically named files in another location... so I
>am ignoring recursive property resolution because I
>don't see how it applies... <var> is for use with
><pathconvert>. You don't *really* need it, but here I
>would use it personally. Even better would be local
>properties for macros, but that's another story... so
>we are going to use <for> and <concat>...
>
>
>
>>I'm not sure what <pathconvert> can do for me
>>here... A mapper sounds more
>>useful (eg <globmapper from="${dir1}/*"
>>to="${dir2}/*"/>), but I don't think it can be used
>>with <concat> ...
>>
>>
>
>Ah, but since 1.6.2 <pathconvert> supports a nested
><mapper>. Actually before that it also supported
>limited mapping via its <map> subelements, but I'm
>personally more comfortable with <mapper>s so that's
>what we'll use here... the following is untested:
>
><property name="dest.dir" location="dest" />
><property name="src.dir" location="src" />
>
><!-- mapper may not be perfect; experiment -->
><mapper id="src2dest" type="glob"
> from="${src.dir}/*" to="${dest.dir}/*" />
>
><for param="f">
> <fileset id="fs" dir="${src.dir}" includes="*" />
> <sequential>
> <!-- unset so we can reuse -->
> <var name="destfile" unset="true" />
> <fileset id="f" file="@{f}" />
> <pathconvert property="destfile">
> <path>
> <fileset refid="f" />
> </path>
> <mapper refid="src2dest" />
> </pathconvert>
> <concat destfile="${destfile}" append="true">
> <fileset refid="f" />
> </concat>
> <sequential>
></for>
>
>As you can see, I only used <var> to unset the
>destfile property. The alternative is to use a
>different property for every file... @{f}.dest
>perhaps, but large numbers of dynamically generated
>property names just feels wrong to me. That's an old
>argument. Anyway, the above should be somewhere in
>the neighborhood assuming I understood the problem
>correctly...
>
>-Matt
>
>
>
>
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