[Ant-contrib-developers] Relentless tasks

[Christopher H. <he...@st...>]

Hi,

We're using Ant and CruiseControl and ant-contrib (and some custom Ant 
tasks of our own) to manage the regression and verification tests for 
our assembly language embedded firmware.  The nature of the tests and 
the time it takes to execute them makes Ant's usual view of "as soon as 
one task fails, stop all work" very inefficient for this particular 
usage.  So, inspired by the <cc> task's relentless parameter, we've 
implementeded two things.

The first is a change to ant-contrib's <for> task, to add a relentless 
attribute.  If this attribute is set to true, the <for> task will 
continue iterating through the entire list/filset/path, even if one of 
the tasks in one of the iterations fails.  At the end, if any task has 
failed, the <for> will fail, otherwise it will succeed.  We do NOT 
relentlessy execute within a given iteration, just from one iteration 
to the next.  (I >think< that should be clear, let me know if it's not)

The second change is a <relentless> task.  This was necessary because 
not every group of tasks that you want to execute relentlessly lends 
itself to <for>.  <relentless> is pretty simple:
    <relentless description="Run the protocol tests" >
		... some list of tasks ...
    </relentless>
<relentless> executes ALL of the tasks in the list - if any of them 
fails, then it will fail at the end.  If all the tasks succeed, then 
<relentless> will succeed.

We've found these so useful that we think others might as well.  Is 
there any interest in considering one or both of these for inclusion in 
ant-contrib?  If so, how do we go about submitting them for perusal? 
Email?  Submit a bug and attach the files?  Or are diffs preferred?  
We're working with the 1.0b1 sources.

				Thanks very much,
					Chris