From: <bin...@li...> - 2001-10-08 18:26:01
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> 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. hmm... go on.. > 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) The JRE requirement bugs me a little (yet more pain in the ass setup... but I'm still interested) > - very powerful and flexible xml configuration of > the build process ooh. > - very extendable with other tasks (so we could easyliy > implement php2xml, bcc etc in a short time ooh. > - covers file permissions, copying files, building distributions > and snapshots, and much more ooh. > - don't mess around with make & various command line tools If we build a configure system I don't see that being a problem. > - 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. We'll do that (easily) with gnu make. > - apache license That's cool. > 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. And that is a big thing for me, at least. I'm taking great pains to design a make system that will be as screaming fast as possible. And what we're doing is mostly implemented in php anyway.. so the role of gnu make will really be just to call our utilities in a convenient way. > 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. Some of the XML config stuff sounds very nice. I'd like to see it function before I bit though :) > 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 have no hatred for java, _but_ we would be mixing languages and that means lots of extra software to install. > I'm going play around a bit with it. Could you send a little quick-setup example to the list so we can check it out and see what we think? If it's cool enough... :) > As I said I'm not very experieced with ant, so what do you think? Let's play with ant a bit and see. _a |