Mailing-List: contact ant-dev-help@jakarta.apache.org; run by ezmlm
From: costin@eng.sun.com
Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2000 17:30:02 -0800 (PST)
To: ant-dev@jakarta.apache.org
Subject: Re: ANT semantics and power
In-Reply-To: <1674700.3160755118@turtle.coral.cs.cmu.edu>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.10.10002281722150.1234-100000@costin.eng.sun.com>
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> I re-iterate my question from before.  What ability do you have currently,
> or could reasonably implement, that you would lose?
> 
> This was the whole point of my turing completness example above.  Ant is
> aleady pretty complex.  Adding nested tasks will in some ways make it
> simpler.

I feel that every feature we add on this direction is a step in the wrong
direction, and makes ant more complex. And I'm afraid we'll end up with a
xml-make. 

Make used to be very simple - a realy great tool. I don't know when it
became the monster it is today.

How many "special" cases do you have in your project? You can build 
Tomcat, xerces, cocoon with only the standard set of tasks. If you have a
need for a <foreach>, why don't you just create a task that is specific to
your problem ?

The question is not what we lose if you add a feature - but what you
really gain that you can't do today using Java as a programming language ?  


Costin