Re: [nant-dev] Rational behind not supporting basedir?

[Ian M. <ianm@ActiveState.com>]

Gert Driesen wrote:

>>> don't support the basedir property.
>>>     
>>
>> Ahh pity.  From an academic, developer to developer point of view I'm
>> curious why that decision was made.  I'm just wondering because
>> obviously that's a big decision since many existing Ant scripts use
>> ${basedir} as a property and it must have been a conscious decision to
>> break the interface.  Obviously a lot of thought must go into each
>> decision that breaks simple compatibility with the original Ant since
>> by the nature of calling it "NAnt" it implies a certain compatibility.
>> At some point I'm sure someone said, "Ok, Ant does it this way but I
>> don't think NAnt should because (fill in blank)"  It's that fill in
>> the blank part I'm after.
>>   
>
>
> I definitely agree that compatibility with Ant would've been nice.
> However, I wasn't involved in NAnt when some of these decision were made.
>  
>
come on - you can find a better example of incompatability than this one 
:) . basedir vs nant.project.basedir is hardly a huge difference and as 
far as I'm aware this is the first time this has been brought up as an 
issue. If it had been that important to a majority of NAnt users then it 
surely would have been changed years ago.

>>> You should either use the project::get-base-directory() or the
>>> nant.project.basedir property
>>>
>>>     
>>
>> Thanks for the advice but I think I'll stick with Ant.  Too many
>> scripts use ${basedir} and I don't want to convert all of those that
>> do to use the NAnt proprietary "project::get-base-directory()" or
>> "nant.project.basedir".  We share these admin-style scripts and I
>> don't want to force others to use nant just to work around this issue.
>>   
>
Proprietry ? its not proprietary its just different. In the online docs 
there is a section for "Ant Users" which says :

"If you have used Ant before than NAnt should feel comfortable but NAnt 
is only compatible with Ant in spirit." - ie its not meant to be an 
exact clone of Ant. 
However on a more positive note - its easy enough to add a basedir 
property thats an alias for project::get-base-directory(). Just add the 
following property definition to NAnt.exe.config

... from line 1095 or so
    <properties>
           <!-- properties defined here are accessible to all build 
files -->
           <!-- <property name="foo" value = "bar" readonly="false" /> -->
           <property name="basedir" value = 
"${project::get-base-directory()}" readonly="false" />                   
</properties>
   </nant>
   ...

and the basedir property will become available to all scripts. Of course 
you'd need to make this change in NAnt.exe.config on every developers 
machine but thats less work than changing all your buil scripts.

Ian