Contrary to what I've said before about making sure the external
interface of 1.5 does not change with bug fixes, I'd like to propose
that we port the addition of the file attribute on AbstractFileSet to
the 1.5 branch. This minor addition makes life so much easier, and I'm
using this new attribute in all my builds now as well.
Before this addition, to get a fileset containing only a single file
when that file is referred to by a property, you had to get a pointer to
its parent directory somehow. With property immutability and the
possibility that someone could override whatever property you use for
the parent directory, its not that safe.
I have two conflicting personal reasons for and against adding this to 1.5.
For: I'm going to be travelling around a bit soon speaking on
Ant/XDoclet and all my example builds are using the 'file' attribute
because its so much cleaner. It would be nice if the attendees could be
up and running with my samples with a released build of Ant 1.5.x
(although I'll likely bundle my version of Ant with any samples I
provide just to be on the safe side for now).
Against: My book does not document the 'file' attribute, of course, and
that would take it a bit out of synch, although its all backwards
compatible and we can add that to our errata list.
But the benefits to the Ant community outweigh any arguments against
adding it, IMO.
So, here's my +1.
Erik
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