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Date: Wed, 08 Nov 2000 19:49:04 +0000
From: Benjamin Reed <ranger@befunk.com>
Organization: DFT
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To: ant-dev@jakarta.apache.org
Subject: Re: OS detection: am I missing the obvious?
References: <OF078484C1.F7FF2F17-ONCC256992.00044AAF@akl.nz.geniesystems.com>
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Aaron Knauf wrote:

> One further comment (truly not intended to stir people up) is that in
> the case of java applications, (I am aware that Ant is not exclusively
> java focussed,)  writing platform dependent build processes is often
> just a work around for lack of attention to platform independence in
> your code.  Java makes a valiant attempt to make this easy, but so
> many people don't bother to take simple precautions.  Having said that
> - I will concede that it doesn't apply in all cases.

Certainly.  In our case, though, we have a large amount of java code,
and a little bit of platform-specific C for things that (as far as I
know) just can't be done in Java (like writing a custom function for the
PostgreSQL engine).  It's annoying that we have to do anything natively,
but in our case it can't be worked around in any simple way.

So as not to sound like a complete downer, I would like to say that for
the most part, Ant is fitting our project exactly.  It works great for
builds, and we've got a 30k build.xml to prove it.  (grin)  I can't
imagine what a pain it'd be to do everything with make.

Consider it a testament to the overall design that we're forced to pick
nits instead of make broad statements about how much things suck.  ;)

In case anyone's interested in what we're doing, I'm involved with
OpenNMS, we're writing a java network management platform.  I guess I
shouldn't say we, I don't really know Java, I'm just in charge of the
build (among other things), but I digress.  I'd welcome any input on our
current build process, and whether there's better ways to do what I'm
doing.

Our main build stuff can be viewed from cvsweb at
http://www.opennms.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/bluebird/

Thanks again for a cool tool!  :)

-- 
Ben Reed a.k.a. Ranger Rick (ranger@befunk.com)
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