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 12781 invoked from network); 5 Apr 2000 02:32:23 -0000 Received: from mother.thoughtworks.com (204.178.39.204) by locus.apache.org with SMTP; 5 Apr 2000 02:32:23 -0000 Subject: includes To: ant-dev@jakarta.apache.org Bcc: X-Mailer: Lotus Notes Release 5.0.2c February 2, 2000 Message-ID: From: mpfoemme@ThoughtWorks.com Date: Tue, 4 Apr 2000 21:30:55 -0500 X-MIMETrack: Serialize by Router on Mother/ThoughtWorks.COM/US(Release 5.0.2c |February 2, 2000) at 04/04/2000 09:31:58 PM MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Spam-Rating: locus.apache.org 1.6.2 0/1000/N I've been lurking on this list for a while and thought I'd go ahead and introduce myself, since I'm very interested in Ant and the direction it's heading in. I'm a lead developer here at ThoughtWorks, and have been working on a tool very similar to Ant for the past nine months, which we're using to manage a couple of fairly large java projects (large from my experience - about 25 developers per project, 400K lines of code total). We're still debating about what to do with our tool; we can either keep developing it internally, open source it, or switch to something like Ant. I'm currently evaluating how feasible it would be to use Ant for a large project, and would appreciate any feedback from anyone attempting this... Anyway, I've seen the topic of "include" statements come up on this list a few times, which we had to deal with for our tool early on. We basically added a java-style "import" statement so that one could import targets from other files, and I imagine a similar thing could be done for ant. For example, if ant encounters a top level statement, it would search the "project path" for an Ant file with the name "foo.xml", parse it, and make the targets available to the importing file. The project path could be specified by the ant.project.path system property, which would default to the current directory if not defined. Identifying ant files in the path might be tricky, since they use the "xml" extension, which is used for a lot of purposes. Would anyone be opposed to using ".ant" as the extension for build files? Matt Foemmel ThoughtWorks, Inc.