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Date: Fri, 12 Jul 2002 13:02:47 -0700 (PDT)
From: costinm@covalent.net
To: Ant Developers List <ant-dev@jakarta.apache.org>,
   Stephane Bailliez <sbailliez@apache.org>
Subject: Re: death of a mutant
In-Reply-To: <002501c229d6$d2ba4c80$d1eefea9@homenkf0y0hwu0>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.44.0207121211160.1675-100000@costinm.sfo.covalent.net>
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On Fri, 12 Jul 2002, Stephane Bailliez wrote:

> > yeah, ant-dev has #3 traffic count on the nagoya archive; it is
> > institutionalised that it will be hard to move people from ant1 to ant2.
> 
> I don't think that the traffic in the dev list can be used this way...I
> think that someone in commons or general did a deeper analysis between #
> messages and unique senders and committers indicating projects with a very
> high development activity and few users.

Well, every java project I know and all java books I've read recently 
are using ant for building. ( not to talk about ant-specific books that 
begin to show ).

That's only for building - there are quite a few testing frameworks
based on ant ( including watchdog and tomcat tests, cactus, anteater,etc).
Tomcat4.1 and 5 will use ant to compile the java files - so you can
indirectly count all its users as ant users :-).

I doubt there are too many java APIs or XML dtds that are more widely
used than ant's. I would bet there are more people who know/use the 
current ant build.xml than xsl or web.xml files. Plus IDEs, etc.

I don't think it'll be as hard as the HTML -> XHTML transition, 
or IP4->IP6, or even JDK1.1->JDK1.2, but it'll be painfull for a lot of 
projects/people.

Of course, that's just my guesstimate - and as I said, I'm usually wrong.

> "on s'en fout" or "nous nous en foutons" first one being more appropriate in
> this case.

It would be a good idea to have all flame-wars in French. That would
keep them shorter :-)

> > We had always said that Ant 2.0 would be Java1.2, even 12+ months ago when
> > it was specced. Maybe it is time to move the Ant to Java1.2, even if that
> > means we have to call it version 2.  We still need to be able to build *for*
> > 1.1 (and should test for that), even though we dont build *on* 1.1.
> 
> Yes I think that's the main point.

I don't see any reason ( given today's JDK situation ) to consider
droping JDK1.1 support unacceptable for ant1.6. It may have been 1 year
ago, when most open source VMs and many OSes didn't have any 1.2 
support. 

As all project requirements - this is something that can be decided
by vote, and so far I haven't seen anyone who consider 1.1 support 
essential ( especially since everyone seems to agree that ant2 
will not support 1.1 ).

I'm -0 on the change - if anyone feels strongly enough that ant1.6
should raise the VM bar he'll have to put it to a vote and we'll
go with the result. If it's negative, I'll try to port the compat
package that would simplify a bit the support of 1.1 ( it's just
an abstract class with 2 implementations, one for 1.1 and one for
1.2 - and all 1.2 methods not in 1.1 are called using it as a wrapper).


Costin


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