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Message-ID: <383EA4C2.357188F4@apache.org>
Date: Fri, 26 Nov 1999 16:18:26 +0100
From: Stefano Mazzocchi <stefano@apache.org>
Organization: Apache Software Foundation
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To: Tomcat <tomcat-dev@jakarta.apache.org>
Subject: Ant doesn't fail when it should
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Hi,

I found a couple of problems with Ant:

1) doesn't check for loops in dependencies.
2) replaces a $(blah) with null if not defined

since I happened to make both mistakes (of course) I admit it wasn't a
pain to find out, but it would be nice to have better sanity checks.

ah, almost forgot: the branch I was going to make is already obsoleted
by what you guys did. So I just threw everything away :/

Feature requests:

1) change javadoc2 to javadoc: I would like the task to find out what
javadoc its present (if any) and deal with that accordingly. I should
not specify it myself, since this would break the platform and we don't
want to do stuff like

  <if test="java.version = 1.2">
    <javadoc2 ...>
   <otherwise/>
    <javadoc1 ...>
  </if>

which clearly sucks.

2) Aim to use JCVS for CVS.java instead of using the command line tools
(better portability)

3) add the "recursive="on|off" and except="filelist" attributes to
<copydir ... > to allow single level copy and useful to reduce verbosity
eliminating multiple <copyfile>

(we should aim to reduce verbosity to a minimum to reduce build.xml
management costs, but without sacrificing readability)

Comments welcome.

-- 
Stefano Mazzocchi      One must still have chaos in oneself to be
                          able to give birth to a dancing star.
<stefano@apache.org>                             Friedrich Nietzsche