[Nant-users] Feature request: ${nant.verbose} property

[John L. <joh...@mi...>]

Hi

I had an idea for a relatively simple (but useful!) feature.  Could we
have a property (you could do it as a function, but that would seem like
overkill, to me) which tells you whether the -v parameter was passed on
the command line?  The reason I ask this is that, while certain NAnt
targets will do different things based on whether this parameter was
passed, I can't find a way to do the same for custom tools, such as
Starteam or FxCop.

With both these tools, it's possible to output a verbose log, which is
useful for debugging.  But when everything's running fine as far as that
tool's concerned, this can just get in the way, inflating log file size,
increasing build times, increasing the time it takes to view the log,
and making it harder to find the bit that you actually want to look at.

For Starteam, I'd like to do something like this:  

	<exec program="${st.exe}" >
		<arg value="lck"/>
		<arg value="-nologo"/>
		<arg value="-p" />
		<arg value="&quot;${st.prjspec}&quot;" />
		<arg value="-u"/>
		<arg value="-is"/>
		<arg value="-break"/>
		<arg value="-x"/>
		<arg value="-q" unless="${nant.verbose}"/>
	
		<arg value="-stop" />
		<arg value="${st.wildcard}" />
	</exec>

The -q parameter is the one that tells Starteam to be quiet, meaning no
output.  The unless parameter uses ${nant.verbose} as its condition,
which would evaluate to true if I pass -v to NAnt, causing it to display
its output.

I could just pass in my own parameter using -D:, but then the command
would look like this:

nant.exe -v -D:verbose="true" mytarget1 mytarget2

Telling it to be verbose twice just seems nasty.  To fix that, I could
add verbose attributes to all tasks, but then the script will look
nasty.  Adding a ${nant.verbose} property that gets set by default would
seem like the best solution.  Minor, I know, but it would be nice.

What do you think?

Regards

John


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