Return-Path: Mailing-List: contact ant-dev-help@jakarta.apache.org; run by ezmlm Delivered-To: mailing list ant-dev@jakarta.apache.org Received: (qmail 71354 invoked from network); 24 Feb 2000 03:53:38 -0000 Received: from adsl-63-198-47-229.dsl.snfc21.pacbell.net (HELO costin.dnt.ro) (63.198.47.229) by locus.apache.org with SMTP; 24 Feb 2000 03:53:38 -0000 Received: from localhost (costin [63.198.47.229]) by costin.dnt.ro (8.9.3+Sun/8.9.1) with ESMTP id TAA15553 for ; Wed, 23 Feb 2000 19:53:31 -0800 (PST) From: costin@eng.sun.com Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2000 11:54:54 -0800 (PST) To: ant-dev@jakarta.apache.org Subject: Proposal: XML output from ant tasks In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII 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 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