Re: [Ejbca-develop] [PATCH] build.xml

[Stephane B. <ste...@be...>]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Tomas Gustavsson" <to...@pr...>

> Btw. I am against moving in cmd and sh scripts in ant. And this is
> because I don't think ant i a tool for everything, and as such should
> not be used for everything. Ant is not ideal for user-commands. For
> instance the command:
> ra.sh adduser foo foo123 "C=SE,O=Foo,CN=Foo" FooCA null null 1 P12
> would have to be written as:
> ant adduser -Dusername=foo -Dpwd=foo...

> Off-course you could prompt for input, but that kills the ability to
> script commands.
> Or am I wrong?

Well, Ant has its limitations of course, I can tell you that, I'm a Ant
committer myself, though a bit inactive these days I would say due to other
constraints. However it is a very nice have in deployment conditions under
any system and does the platform handling transparently. I'm also far from
being a 'input' fanatic excepts in some rare cases because as you said, it
kills the scripting. Ant has mostly to be configured upfront to run smoothly
and can do some things rather nicely and others not that nicely.

The current ejbca command line system is less than ideal due to
duplication/maintenance problem and lacks of semantic in the command line,
for instance too many arguments are thrown in the command line without a
clue what they are, so a couple of flags would be nice. I suggest looking
toward a more flexible implementation using commons-cli
http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/cli/
for handling command line parsing.

I may look into that this week if that's ok for you.

> We looked at that earlier, but scrapped the idea because it did not
> imporove user experience, rather the other way around. That was
> off-course in earlier days of ant.

Fair enough. Though I'm not sure when was that :)

Stephane