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From: "Bernard Davison" <bdavison@towertechnology.com.au>
To: ant-dev@jakarta.apache.org
Message-ID: <CA25688F.00180C8D.00@notesnt.towertechnology.com.au>
Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 14:24:52 +1000
Subject: Re: Proposal: XML output from ant tasks
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Looks like a great idea.

may I suggest that the log by default not be in xml format,
instead add a -logxml to the ant command line, the same as -quite and -verbose.

I have been thinking for a while about doing the same in a perl Log module that
I have written. but have not made a start on it yet.

see ya
bernie.


Hi,

Right now ant has a very nice file format and works great, but if you
build a large project you'll probably get a lot of messages - some of them
are warnings ( deprecated methods ), some are important info ( time to
build, non-critical failures ).

Also, with conditional compilation we will have some very important
messages describing what was actualy build into the dist.

The problem is that it takes time to extract the information, and it is
hard to automate it.

One possible solution is ( guess what? ) xml. If we convert all logs to
display well-formed XML it will be easy to post-process the results
and even have a nice format.

The price is not big - the output will still be readable.  It can be an
incremental job, with log() changed to wrap everything in a generic
<log:ant > tag with the source and level, and then we can add format to
the most important messages ( like deprecations, not-fatal warnings,
conditional compilations, etc).

What do you think?

Costin