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Date: Tue, 07 Oct 2003 11:35:46 -0700
From: Steve Loughran <steve_l@iseran.com>
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To: Ant Developers List <dev@ant.apache.org>
Subject: Re: files and properties
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Matt Benson wrote:
> (Apologies in advance for the length of this post)
> 
> The feeling has been growing in me that a future
> version of Ant should abstract the concept of file I/O
> with an interface that can supply InputStreams and
> OutputStreams, or Readers and Writers if we can
> restrict to character content--which would be quite
> possible--or both.  With this type of abstraction a
> property could be treated as a file (existing
> properties could be read-only and throw appropriate
> Exceptions when overwrite attempts were made.  This
> could add, I feel, a good deal of flexibility for a
> fairly low cost.
> 
> I guess the motivating factor to this idea is my
> intense dislike of the clutter of temp files,
> especially when they do very little.
> 
> Comments?

There has been discussion on a better abstract file/directory 
abstraction, as there are so many more things than a file system that 
can be a source or a dest.

Properties are an interesting one, the inside of JAR and ZIP files 
another, remote ftp, http and SCP connections a third.

There is the VFS project in the jakarta commons sandbox
http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/sandbox/vfs/index.html
that implements this. The ant tasks there look kind of slick. I should 
play with them myself.


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