Hello list, I've been working with ant for three years now, and have implemented from scratch a build system that works fine. We use ant 1.6.5.
However, I have found myself using "external" utilities more than once because of some limitations/unexpected behaviors, so I'd like to know what's cooking for the next version(s) of ant. 1. ant-contrib I find myself using ant-contrib extensively throughout the project for the following tags: * var, * for, * assert, * try/catch, * if/then/else, * propertyregex I especially find var and if/then/else useful (in fact, must-haves), and find the use of for/propertyregex much, much easier (much more natural) to use than ant's mappers when handling complex file renaming (OK, the fact that I know regexes quite well also helps). Are there plans to include ant-contrib in ant itself? 2. Unordered file sets We have to concatenate JavaScript files into one big file and then minify it. The list of files to minify is within a file itself. So, I first tried to use the concat task with <fileset dir="thebasedir" includesfile="thefilelist"/>. The problem is, this reorders the file list in alphabetical order and we don't want that! Is there a plan to have unordered file sets (which is a pleonasm anyway, since a set has no order by definition)? 3. "cp"-like copy task Here's a question: how do you do, with ant, the equivalent of this command: cp -r */src/java/* dstdir/ Well, I have struggled for more than one hour trying to do this, and couldn't. So I gave up, and resorted to using <exec>... Resulting in a non portable way of doing things, but it's very simple and it works. It would be very, very useful to have such a task by default. Have fun! -- Francis Galiegue ONE2TEAM Ingénieur système Mob : +33 (0) 6 83 87 78 75 Tel : +33 (0) 1 78 94 55 52 [EMAIL PROTECTED] 40 avenue Raymond Poincaré 75116 Paris --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
