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Message-ID: <20010206173523.46226.qmail@web10414.mail.yahoo.com>
Date: Tue, 6 Feb 2001 09:35:23 -0800 (PST)
From: Andrew Goodnough <agoodno@yahoo.com>
Subject: Best practices and folder breakdown
To: Ant User List <ant-user@jakarta.apache.org>
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I just downloaded the source for Ant 1.3 Beta 1.  I was
looking for the jars to include in my path and found that
only the xml parser jars were in the $ANT\lib directory.  I
expected to find ant.jar and optional.jar in there, too,
after running build.bat.  My first question is - which
ant.jar and optional.jar files do I include?  Do I copy
them from $ANT\dist\lib\ to $ANT\lib\?

This brought up a broader question for me.  What is the
intention of the folder hierarchy and the build scripts
which use them?  Also, what are some best practices in this
area?  Like, do most people have one directory to build the
jars and then copy them to a different directory for
developers?

I would be happy to help with the documentation in this
area (Diane's little buddy, maybe :-)) but I do think it
could be helpful to define some assumptions that have been
made.  Maybe this stuff is obvious to developers who work
with open source often but for those who don't, here's the
kind of thing I'm thinking of:

$ANT/src
The src folder is the main repository for source code and
if you intend to add tasks you should follow the package
naming standards and then place them here.  Running
$ANT/build.bat, which calls $ANT/bootstrap.bat if needed,
will compile all source files (including your new task) to
the build directory and then create jars out of them....

.....more.....

$ANT/bootstrap
{explanation of this folder}

$ANT/build
{explanation of this folder}

$ANT/dist
{explanation of this folder}


So what does everyone think?  Is this something that is
needed?


=====
Andy

*****************
Andrew Goodnough
agoodno@yahoo.com

How do you know you've come far enough, until you've gone too far? - Sheldon Kopp

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