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To: ant-dev@jakarta.apache.org
Subject: Re: How to tell what Javac did?
References: <001901bfc709$41168050$80dc1fcb@cognet.com.au>
From: Stefan Bodewig <bodewig@bost.de>
Date: 26 May 2000 15:16:06 +0200
In-Reply-To: "Conor MacNeill"'s message of "Fri, 26 May 2000 21:55:15 +1000"
Message-ID: <m3wvkhjvu1.fsf@sbodewig.bost.de>
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>>>>> "CM" == Conor MacNeill <conor@m64.com> writes:

 CM> I am in two minds over this whole thread.

Guess I know what you are talking about.

I don't want to put any kind of explicit control into the XML-file. It
is the usual "we don't want to make Ant another Perl" pattern.

To put my idea into context, see that core/spec.html talks about
Project being a store for properties (not necessarily String valued)
that can be set and retrieved by tasks. 

So what I've talked about would by a special property that could be
used by both targets and tasks.

I'm more and more convinced that if we need runtime control of Ant's
execution, the script-task is the way to go. Script could be used to
fetch the last tasks return value and tell Project to skip the next
target or whatever.

 CM> When I built my weblogic tasks, I used a Java task internally to
 CM> invoke a helper class with a defined classpath. This is a
 CM> slightly unusual use of the Java task object. I wanted to know
 CM> the return code from that Java task, but there was no way to get
 CM> at it.

When Thomas Haas and I worked on the JUnit task we had exactly the
same problem and Tom solved it exactly the same way as you describe
it. But - as you've said - this one is a different thing as we are
talking about a task being invoked by another task.

Stefan