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To: ant-dev@jakarta.apache.org
Subject: Re: A question about "available" and doing conditionals in a build
 xml  file.
References: <B57177BB.47FA%james.davidson@eng.sun.com>
From: Stefan Bodewig <bodewig@bost.de>
Date: 19 Jun 2000 09:03:22 +0200
In-Reply-To: James Duncan Davidson's message of "Sun,
 18 Jun 2000 01:15:00 -0700"
Message-ID: <m366r62lvp.fsf@sbodewig.bost.de>
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>>>>> "JDD" == James Duncan Davidson <james.davidson@eng.sun.com> writes:

 JDD> Nit: properties aren't tasks

Somebody should change docs/index.html#tasks then ;-)

 JDD> on 5/18/00 2:18 AM, Stefan Bodewig at bodewig@bost.de wrote:

 >> Most (all?) people involved agree that some way of conditional
 >> compilation - or more generally conditional task execution - is
 >> needed, but there are different opinions about how to do this.

 JDD> I still think that conditional compilation can be handled inside
 JDD> the javac task. :)

If you're talking about include/exclude tags I'm almost convinced they
are sufficient - this means that my projects get along with them quite
well without a need for further logic support from Ant. 

What I still really need is a way to specify the include/exclude lists
in an external file to get build files that are more readable.

This doesn't help with the more general problem of conditional task
execution. I get away with conditional target execution (and have
added an unless attribute to target in my private version of Ant).

Stefan