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From: rubys@us.ibm.com
To: ant-dev@jakarta.apache.org
Message-ID: <85256895.003AA490.00@d54mta04.raleigh.ibm.com>
Date: Wed, 1 Mar 2000 05:36:58 -0500
Subject: Re: What flavour of scripting?
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William Uther wrote:
>> rubys@us.ibm.com wrote:
>>> In fact, I'm mildly against having a <foreach> task as it forces is to
>>> examine the shortcomings of the existing tasks.
>
>I must admit I find this statement disturbing.
>
>"We can't look over there!  We might find out that things are broken!"
>
>I'd much rather look the broken bits in the face and choose not to fix
them
>for some reason (or put them at low priority on a ToDo list) than just not
>look at them.

Other than the obvious typo (is => us), I'm not sure why my statement
wasn't clear.  It appears to me that we actually are agreeing.

The request for a <foreach> has come up, as a "good enough" solution for
some problems people are facing.  When I asked what the implications were
to it not being present, Ludovic indicated that he would find it handy to
working around a lack of function in the rmic task, and indicated that
perhaps it would be better to fix that task or create a new one.

So...the reason I am suggesting that we hold back on a general <foreach> is
that by not having this feature, we are forced to more often "look over
there" and fix those "broken bits".

Then, once this is done, we can discuss adding a <foreach> - at this point
it should no longer be needed!  ;-)

- Sam Ruby