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Subject: Re: ANT 1.7 features suggestion
References: <4097CC3B.40509@chello.nl>
From: Stefan Bodewig <bodewig@apache.org>
Date: Tue, 11 May 2004 09:06:55 +0200
In-Reply-To: <4097CC3B.40509@chello.nl> (Anthony Goubard's message of "Tue,
 04 May 2004 19:00:43 +0200")
Message-ID: <m37jvjv3w0.fsf@bodewig.bost.de>
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I'm soo late for the party that I'll try to not restart the whole
thing.

On Tue, 04 May 2004, Anthony Goubard <adagoubard@chello.nl> wrote:

>  1) Integrate if and unless at the Task level.

A nested <condition> would be far more powerful, as would be an <if>
task.  Don't expect any opinion from me.  8-)

>  3) Regexp conditions

SMOP.

If anybody wanted to code them up (using Ant's regexp engine
abstraction layer, of course), I'm sure there wouldn't be any
objections.

>  4) Add an "overwrite" attribute at the property task.  Properties
>  are immutable but sometimes I think that you would like to change a
>  propety.

I don't think this would be a good idea since immutability is
something that the parent build file relies upon and adding the
attribute would give the child build file control over it.  An
overwritable attribute that the parent could set would be more inline
with the intent of Ant (why properties are immutable).  Not that I was
advocating it.

Most cases where you've used <antcall> with <param> can be replaced by
<macrodef> and your "need to be mutable" properties become attributes
that way.  I've found that this addresses most needs for mutable
properties at the same time.

>  5) Merge some jar files

Would defeat the reason why we've split up optional.jar in the first
place.

>  - I think that more than 50% of the users uses Java 1.4 and all the
>  tasks that can be realized with 1.4 should be in the same jar file
>  : xalan, xslp, swing,

Some of our users run Kaffee with the swing classes for Java 1.1 from
Sun.  You may want to load the swing lib via a different classloader
than main Ant.  Same for TraX/Xalan and any JDK < 1.4.

>  6) Get the properties from a target after antcall

Would immediately break tons of builds that rely on throw-away
properties during <antcall> if it became the default.  You probably
wouldn't want to keep all properties anyway, just a few of them.

Stefan

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