Welcome to ant-user, Drew my friend! :) I was waiting to post on this issue until others had gotten a chance to weigh in on it. I have corresponded with Drew on this issue via private e-mail quite a bit and have even pushed back on him with the same "give me a use-case" speech. I certainly cannot do justice to his scenario by explaining it myself, but the idea is that he wants to drop in sub-projects into his directory structure and have them "auto-detected" and incorporated into a master build routine automatically. Drew, is this accurate? Could you elaborate on your scenario a bit if I'm not explaining it properly? I have even pushed back on Drew to get involved with ant-dev to explain this to everyone and to even make a patch and submit it. I have even prodded him to write a "crawler" task to be bascially an . After mulling this over a fair bit, I do believe his use-case is valid (because I can't think of a reason to *not* provide the target name). While some will say this is a slippery slope to Ant becoming a scripting language, I don't think so. Why shouldn't Ant provide this context to to tasks? I liken Ant to JSP/Taglibs a fair bit, and within a taglib you have access to page, request, session, and application scope contexts. Is there a reason Ant should not provide similar "scoping"? Taglibs are all about making JSP's *not* scripty - to get rid of <% %> junk. So, for the record, I am +1 on us adding the main target name being executed to Ant (probably as "ant.target.name"). I'm CC'ing ant-dev. While Drew's rant on ant-user was certainly harsh, he's been brewing this issue over with me privately some in the past so he was not posting on this issue for the first time, only for the first time on the list. It may likely get veto'd by ant-dev. And I personally don't have the time to make this change, so if it gets accepted, Drew, will you supply the patch for it? But, in the mean time, I have these requests/suggestions for Drew: 1) Why not make this change to a local copy of Ant yourself and save yourself the trouble of writing your own build file generator? Then the patch is ready, you'll learn the good/bad/ugly of Ant's source code, and you can always run your own version of Ant forever! :) 2) If you do continue on the build file generator path (as others have done, so you may be reinventing the wheel on this, check the archives of ant-dev), would you submit it back to ant-dev at the very least for archive purposes, or perhaps we even commit it to our CVS? 3) Question: how are you able to determine the target at run time with your template pre-processor? You mean you are just able to supply it statically into the generated build files, correct? Erik p.s. No offense to any other Java developers out there that I know personally, but Drew is by far the sharpest and most innovative Java developer/architect I've ever had the pleasure of working with. He is truly "ahead of his time" architecturally and the things I've seen him build push the envelope of my comprehension. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Drew Davidson" To: "Ant Users List" Sent: Thursday, February 28, 2002 4:11 PM Subject: Re: Determine target's name > Diane Holt wrote: > > > --- Drew Davidson wrote: > > > Well if you want to reduce the maintenance burden then rm -fr * the > > > whole repository. > > > > > > Ok, that was rude. > > > > [Additional barking deleted] > > > > Yes, it was -- but then, so was all the rest, so why single that one out? > > I don't believe the rest of the post was rude, only that one comment, and that > was a joke (should have put :-) perhaps). The rest is a rational explanation > of what I feel is going on with ant development. > > > Recommendation: Recall the honey/vinegar adage and resubmit your proposal > > a bit more graciously. People working on open-source projects do it for > > free, in their (usually exceedingly limited) free time, and the last thing > > they need is some snippy snide little rant being thrown at them. > > This proposal for determining target at runtime occurs extremely often on the > list and it shot down every time for what I see is no good reason; that is the > frustration that I feel. You are now entering a new excuse: we don't have the > time to do it right, so be grateful for what you are getting and shut up with > your annoying comments. Thanks, Diane. I believe that I will shut up about > this from now on. > > I'm giving up on trying to use ant directly, BTW (i.e hand-writing ant build > files). I am writing a templating preprocessor that will give me the > functionality that I need that will output Ant XML and run that for the > build. I am also able to determine the build target at runtime :-) > > - Drew > > > -- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: > For additional commands, e-mail: > > -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: For additional commands, e-mail: