Hi Dominique and all,
You've spotted exactly the issue at hand. :-) Please accept for purposes of discussion the requirement that Ant MUST be used in a
procedural manner. Plans to use scriptdef and Groovy are in the works, but that's not now. So, the question is what are the best
set of practices to do in the case that only Ant and Ant-Contrib are allowable and one wants to have reasonably modular-looking code
that differentiates between public APIs, test APIs, internal "functions and macros"?
I was thinking that <runtarget> would serve as a function call mechanism, but what I've heard in this mailing list is that I should
use <macrodef> instead. Are there any things that I won't be able to do with macrodef that I could do with runtarget (and the other
way around)? The one advantage of using runtarget is that in Eclipse it shows up in Outline view as an unfilled target. This makes
it easy to categorize code as follows:
* Filled-target-icon in Outline View: "Public" API Tasks
* Unfilled-target-icon in Outline View: "Local Tasks" that are either major portions of a
task or are "Test" APIs
* Macrodef-icon in Outline View: "Reusable code" that I don't think of as a
task or subtask
* Scriptdef-icon in Outline View: is not helpful because the scriptdef name
isn't shown (compared to target and macrodef elements)
And, with conventions being followed to help distinguish between public APIs (publicAPIName), test APIs (_.testAPIName), internal
"functions" and macrodefs (_internalFunctionMacrodefEtc), the code is reasonably easy to read.
Believe it or not, the ability or organize code better feels like a good reason to prefer runtarget over macrodef. I'm still
curious as to whether there are any practical (e.g., perfomance) reasons for favoring macrodef over runtarget.
Gotta love this group... good technical discussions here!
Enjoy,
Steve Amerige
SAS Institute, Deployment Software Developer
* P.S.
On 7/8/2011 11:49 AM, Dominique Devienne wrote:
Using<antcall> and<runtarget> is IMHO a symptom of using Ant and
builds with a wrong (procedural) mindset. I've created lots of large
and complex builds in the past without any, so it's certainly not
necessary to idiomatic Ant usage, although it remains quite popular to
many:) My $0.02. --DD
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