Re: [Nant-users] Ant vs. NAnt

[Berin L. <blo...@ap...>]

Erv Walter wrote:

> How will you be "porting" your .NET code to Linux and Mac?  Mono?  If 
> so, Nant works on Linux with Mono today, and I assume it would work on 
> Mac as well as soon as Mono works on Mac (if it doesn't already).
>  
> The main difference between Nant and Ant is what tasks are 
> available.  Ant inherently knows a lot about how to build Java 
> applications and has few/no tasks for building .NET applications.  Nant 
> inherently knows a lot about how to build .NET applications and has 
> few/no tasks specific to Java compilation.  Nant's .NET building tasks 
> have been built with the framework abstracted so that it can build using 
> .NET 1.0, .NET 1.1, or Mono without changing your build file.
>  
> Yes, you could use Ant to build .NET applications, but you may end 
> up developing a lot of Ant tasks yourself to do so (or you'll be using a 
> lot of <exec> tasks).

The latest and greatest ANT does provide a number of .NET tasks.  That said,
you would need both Java and .NET to use ANT.  ANT will allow you to build
and link files, but there is nothing like the <ndoc/> tag to produce the API
docs.  There is a definite tradeoff.  That said, ANT has a number of things
that make complex builds possible and has existed longer so it has adapted
to a more generic set of build tasks.  Nant is rock solid, and even though it
has not been around as long as ANT, will do everything you need to do for most
.NET based projects.  Most people don't need complex build environments, nor
do they really want them.

-- 

"They that give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety
  deserve neither liberty nor safety."
                 - Benjamin Franklin