On Thu, 7 Sep 2000, Diane Holt wrote: [del] > was being told by the tasks it needed to run). I was really looking > forward to that happening, since being able to "dry run" things is > something I've come to rely on for debugging big, complicated build > processes. [del]
Well in the ideal world Ant really doesn't need a -n option and you shouldn't have a complicated build process. The problem with -n is that it does not print out the execution the same as without the -n option. Why is this? If a task depends upon another task completing its work then the -n option will not be able to process the second task as the dependency fails. This process is made even worse with Make in that you need to be able to decipher the what shell commands are being invoked when you start using black magic. So far in my use of Ant I have not needed a -n option and my build.xml is not complicated. I've not needed -n because its quicker and easier to do "ant clean; ant" than to start worrying about complex dependencies that require specific ordering to be built correctly and thus debugged. My goal is to get my project built. Preferably this should be a quick processes. The reason for complex build procedures with make is usually because make invokes java once for each file and to get a quick build I need to compile less java source. My project took 45 minutes to build with make and takes less than 5 minutes if you just do javac *.java. I'm of the opinion that you can simplify your build process by breaking your project up into smaller components which can each be built simply. Your mileage may vary. Barrie -- Barrie Treloar ____________________________________________________________________ Barrie Treloar Phone: +61 8 8303 3300 Senior Analyst/Programmer Fax: +61 8 8303 4403 Electronic Commerce Division Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Camtech (SA) Pty Ltd http://www.camtech.com.au --- Level 8, 10 Pulteney Street, Adelaide SA 5000, Australia. --- ____________________________________________________________________
