[binarycloud-dev] ANT vs. MAKE

[<bin...@li...>]

Hi All,

preior I want to state that I'm not trying to force or somehow to replace
the make-system with ant. This is just a evil thought of mine occured some
time ago and maybe ant is a option. Maybe.

Has anybody deeper insight and experience with ANT (a very versatile java
based tool)? I just had a brief look over it and I personally think ant does
implement very much of the advanced make we're going to create. Thus we
would create double work by implementing ant flexibility with make.

I'm not experienced with ant, nor did I try to setup a base build config to
see how it performs (but I will :-)). Ant is primary designed for Java
applications, but it can be used for any other builds. From my knowledege of
ant, I've gained so far, the befits are:

- standardized and established
- really portable (unix, linux, windows) without having
  extra utilities installed (only requirement is jre)
- very powerful and flexible xml configuration of
  the build process
- very extendable with other tasks (so we could easyliy
  implement php2xml, bcc etc in a short time
- covers file permissions, copying files, building distributions
  and snapshots, and much more
- don't mess around with make & various command line tools
- recursive build support (call ant on every package level,
  and only build files in that package or in that package
  and everything below) with seperation of source and output.
- apache license

The only thing it requires is jre and ant itself and as it runs withing
native windows (no cygwin required, afaik) we don't need all the make tools
and don't take care of all windows specific stuff (/ = \ etc). Of courses it
is based on java and so the startup, and execution is not as fast as make
and friends.

The big advantage is protability, flexiblity and most stuff we plan is
already utilized with ant. So I think we should seriously consider a
possible usage of ant.

I know some of you guys don't love Java, so I do. And introducing another
technology in bc may be not wanted. But not everything about java is bad,
and ant might be a candidate of "take the good things leave the bad".

I'm going play around a bit with it.

As I said I'm not very experieced with ant, so what do you think?

andi