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From: Peter Vogel <pvogel@arsin.com>
To: "'ant-user@jakarta.apache.org'" <ant-user@jakarta.apache.org>
Subject: RE: Can someone tell me what is so great about Ant?
Date: Tue, 6 Feb 2001 11:34:49 -0800 
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Check out "cons" www.dsmit.com/cons/

It does dependency scanning and maintains an
MD5 signature for determining whether a rebuild
of a file is necessary, the signature incorporates
ALL the inputs (including the compiler and the compiler
command line) that lead to a derived object so
it is quite good at rebuilding what it should and not
rebuilding what it should not.

-Peter 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: King Dale [mailto:KingD@tce.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, February 06, 2001 10:25 AM
> To: 'ant-user@jakarta.apache.org'
> Subject: Can someone tell me what is so great about Ant?
> 
> 
> I don't mean to be a troll, but I have been trying to find a 
> good Java build
> tool. I have seen lots of hype about Ant and have looked at 
> it and I'd just
> like to say I am not that impressed. I am hoping someone can 
> show me where I
> am wrong. Maybe there are some better ways to do things as 
> all I have seen
> are simple build script examples.
> 
> It is supposedly a powerful tool that replaces make, but I 
> find lots of
> problem with it as a build tool. Here is a simple example. 
> Let's use the
> build.xml directly from the documentation:
> 
> <project name="MyProject" default="dist" basedir=".">
> 
>   <!-- set global properties for this build -->
>   <property name="src" value="." />
>   <property name="build" value="build" />
>   <property name="dist"  value="dist" />
> 
>   <target name="prepare">
>     <!-- Create the time stamp -->
>     <tstamp/>
>     <!-- Create the build directory structure used by compile -->
>     <mkdir dir="${build}" />
>   </target>
> 
>   <target name="compile" depends="prepare">
>     <!-- Compile the java code from ${src} into ${build} -->
>     <javac srcdir="${src}" destdir="${build}" />
>   </target>
> 
>   <target name="dist" depends="compile">
>     <!-- Create the ${dist}/lib directory -->
>     <mkdir dir="${dist}/lib" />
> 
>     <!-- Put everything in ${build} into the 
> MyProject-${DSTAMP}.jar file
> -->
>     <jar jarfile="${dist}/lib/MyProject-${DSTAMP}.jar" 
> basedir="${build}" />
>   </target>
> 
>   <target name="clean">
>     <!-- Delete the ${build} and ${dist} directory trees -->
>     <delete dir="${build}" />
>     <delete dir="${dist}" />
>   </target>
> </project>
> 
> And let's create Main.java and Foo.java defined as follows:
> public class Main
> {
>     public static void main( String[] args )
>     {
>         Foo.test();
>     }
> }
> 
> public class Foo
> {
>     public static void test()
>     {
>         System.out.println( "Foo.test()" );
>     }
> }
> 
> I run Ant and it builds correctly. But let's say I need to change the
> signature of Foo.test and I add a parameter, but I forget to 
> make the change
> in Main. If I run Ant again it will tell me that it built 
> successfully, but
> I have successfully built an inconsistent target. The code 
> will not run
> since Main was not recompiled.
> 
> Certainly I could write my own tasks and explicit rules to 
> fix this, but all
> I want to do is build, not write my own make tool. Or I could 
> simply always
> rebuild all files by deleting the generated classes, but then 
> all Ant is is
> a glorifed batch file. Perhaps others have some other ideas on this.
> 
> Something else I look for, but is extremely rare in make tools is the
> ability to handle that file dates can go backwards. For 
> instance when using
> an SCM tool and I am working on version 2.x and there is a 
> problem found in
> version 1.9. I will check out the source files for 1.9 but 
> they will have
> dates older than the current files and even though the files 
> are different
> they will not be built because the generated files are newer. 
> One way for a
> build tool to handle this is to maintain a build log that is 
> consulted for
> the next build. That build log says that file X with a 
> certain timestamp was
> generated from this list of files with timestamps. If any of 
> the time stamps
> are not equal to what is in the log, X is regernerated. The 
> only build tool
> I know of that does this sort of thing is omake in ClearCase.
> 
> Hopefully these will be taken as ideas for further improvement.
> 
> ---
>  -- Dale King
>