At 09:56 27/6/00 -0500, you wrote: > Being a new guy coming to Ant, however, I wonder why nesting of tags >is not used mroe to help organize these issues. Why not have a tag like ><worklist> which can have a sequential set of sub-tasks inside it, that >execute on that same set of files? That way Exec could always execute within >a known context, and build.xml writers could have the freedom to choose >MatchingTask functionality or not; exec wouldn't care. Comments?
I suspect because it becomes driven by files and implicit dependencies - very Makefile like not very explainable for certain tasks (ie Javadoc works with packages not files) and has a high baggae factor. While I find it easy it is prolly because I spent years make hacking but Ant is meant to be target driven rather than task/target/file/+various other implicit rules like make. It is still evolving and maybe similar functionality will evolve but putting in something like this would just make ant a java-xml version of make. (And a lot of people don't wanna go down that path :P) So hopefully the functionality will be present soon ... when ? I don't know - how ? don't know that either. Feel free to make suggestions thou :P Cheers, Pete *------------------------------------------------------* | "Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want | | to test a man's character, give him power." | | -Abraham Lincoln | *------------------------------------------------------*
