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Date: Wed, 19 Apr 2000 04:04:41 -0700
From: James Duncan Davidson <james.davidson@eng.sun.com>
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To: ant-dev@jakarta.apache.org
Subject: Re: Ant Principles
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> * It's out for Linux on some architectures but what am I going to do
> with my alpha - if I had one that is.

If. If you are hard core Java though, at some point you migrate to the
platforms with decent Java support. It's unfortunate, but...

> * What's with HP/UX and several of IBM's OSs - everything that's not
> AIX I mean.

HP/UX has had decent JDK 1.2 support since forever ago. They were one of
the first people out with JDK 1.2 -- and I think that at the 1.2 launch
they actually had a better performing implementation of 1.2 than anybody
else.

> You knew somebody would say that and that this kind of discussion
> could get infinite.

Yep. But it's my kneejerk reaction. I'm tired of the cycle of waiting to
move to 1.2. It's a silly cycle, but marketers look at developers, see
that they are using 1.1, then decide to stay at 1.1. Apple didn't make
JDK 1.2 a priority until Mac OS X because their marketing people were
convinced that since all development was happening with 1.1, they could
justify staying with 1.1. This is all been talked about on mrj-dev, so
there's no inside info here btw.

> But the main question - to mee at least - is, do we need Java 2
> features at all?

Do we really *need* 1.1 features. :) Yes, you could make do with 1.0 if
you really wanted to. OK, so that could be considered a troll, but you
see my point don't you?

> I see that File.getParentFile could not be used in Project.copyFile
> but is this really a problem? Where would Ant benefit from JDK 1.2?

Collections.
File.listRoots() -- could be damn handy in resolving file names
that start with a letter':' pattern.
File.setLastModified() -- some people doing builds set a build time.
File.setReadOnly() -- could be nice.
JarInputStream / OutputStream for building jars with manifests and sigs
Manifest -- also for modifying manifests
JarURLConnection -- for tweaking resources inside jars

There's other things, mostly small, but useful to not have to recreate.

.duncan