[macker-developer] Patch to help running in a forked JVM under Ant

[Ross B. <ro...@ce...>]

Hi,

Congratulations & many thanks for Macker, it is a useful tool to have!

After experimenting with it for a while I'm now integrating it an Ant
build environment, and in doing so I've found a couple of issues:

1. Macker slows to a crawl as its memory usage approaches the JVM's max.
In other ant tasks (eg. javadoc) this is normally solved by forking off
a new JVM with a large maximum memory. While macker supports forking, it
doesn't provide a way to set the max memory for the new JVM. 

(I realise I can increase the memory of the original Ant JVM using
something like ANT_OPTS=-Xmx256M, but I prefer to keep the Ant
environment as standard as possible: the less developers have to alter
the better)

2. When forking a new JVM, the macker ant task adds the name of every
class file as an argument to the new process. This fails with a largish
number of classes, presumably due to the command line being too long. 

Attached is a patch that aims to solve these issues by doing the
following simple things:

a. Adding an optional 'maxmemory' attribute to the macker ant task so
that the max memory of the forked JVM can be specified.

b. Adding support for an indirect input file to macker. A command line
argument of the form '@file' means that each line in 'file' identifies a
class file to process.

c. Updating the macker ant task so that when forking a new JVM it passes
the list of class files via a temporary @file, rather than listing them
all on the command line.

The patch was made against the CVS sources as at Sun Nov 16 04:44:14 UTC
2003, using 'cvs diff -b -c'.  Please let me know if I should submit the
proposed changes in some other way.  

Regards,

Ross Burnett <ro...@ce...>