Diane Holt wrote: > I'm not trying to re-open this debate, honestly, but I just have to say > that I find it interesting that you think heading towards something like > "configure" is desirable, just to avoid having a test-for-value. > Personally, I find "configure" to be one of the yuckiest mangled mess of > spaghetti-ed crud I've ever run into (and I've run into a considerable > amount of mangled crud over the years, so that's saying quite a lot).
I second this. :) It seems to me that if you're going to have properties like os available, it should be made easy to use those properties to do conditionals, without having to go through touching files or other weird hackish things. Otherwise, there's no point in giving the architecture you're running on, if you have to jump through hoops to do anything architecture-specific based on that information. I understand that Ant is supposed to be simple, but an OS-specific check like this is going to be very common (I'm going through it as well on our project, at the moment I'm getting around it with properties files... Windows 98.properties, Linux.properties, etc. Ugly. But still not nearly as ugly as Makefiles ;) There's a point where simplicity just means that the user (well, developer?) is going to end up implementing something over and over again.
