Mailing-List: contact dev-help@ant.apache.org; run by ezmlm
Precedence: bulk
Reply-To: "Ant Developers List" <dev@ant.apache.org>
Received-SPF: neutral (athena.apache.org: local policy)
From: Stefan Bodewig <bodewig@apache.org>
To: dev@ant.apache.org
Subject: target-group in trunk
Date: Thu, 10 Dec 2009 06:11:34 +0100
Message-ID: <874onzs9a1.fsf@v35516.1blu.de>
User-Agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/23.1 (gnu/linux)
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii

Hi,

this is just a description of what target-group in trunk currently is
and what it is not.  I'll describe the implementation rather than the
initial phase concept as it is implemented in EasyAnt which uses a
custom ProjectHelper to implement its slightly different concept.

This mail serves as background in addition to the thread Nicolas has
started.

A target-group is basically a target with two differences:

* must be empty

* its depends list can be added to during parse time.  Other targets and
  target-groups can declare themselves as part of the group and get
  added to the group's depends list.

That's all.  Order of execution is still only determined by the depends
attributes of all targets.

For anybody running a build target-groups are just like targets.  They
are listed together with targets in -projecthelp and create BuildEvents
and log output of targets.

A target-group is not a container of targets.  It doesn't provide a
grouping in a sense that a target would be executed as part of a group -
the depends lists of all targets and target-groups still determine the
order.

Since a target-group is always empty, the if and unless attributes don't
have any effect at all.

Of course we could change the implementation to get to a more
composite-like implementation - making if and unless useful and maybe
introduce new build events - it is just not clear (to me) whether the
additional effort would provide anything more useful.

Stefan

---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscribe@ant.apache.org
For additional commands, e-mail: dev-help@ant.apache.org