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From: "Conor MacNeill" <conor@cortexebusiness.com.au>
To: <ant-dev@jakarta.apache.org>
Subject: File paths as properties
Date: Fri, 3 Aug 2001 01:37:04 +1000
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Hi,

I tried to build tomcat 4 today and it has some problems finding the
servlet API.

It defines in the top level build.xml file

  <property name="servletapi.home"  value="../jakarta-servletapi-4/dist"/>

It then calls a build file in catalina

    <ant dir="./catalina" target="all"/>

Now, in catalina, the property is also defined

  <property name="servletapi.home"
value="../../jakarta-servletapi-4/dist"/>

Now, obviously, that will not be overridden, and the build fails - at least
for me. I'm not sure if I have missed something, or whether I'm not
building it the right way but it suggested some ideas to me

1. inheritAll flag is a good thing

2. Perhaps, we should have a mode for the property task to resolve a path

<property name="servletapi.home"  path="../jakarta-servletapi-4/dist"/>

This would resolve the relative file to an absolute path, so it can be
passed to subbuilds and still work.

Thoughts?

Conor