Thanks for posting and responding, Simeon. [I've removed the less interesting parts of the original message to make room for, hopefully, the good stuff.]
<snip> > Thanks for your interest in Ant and Antidote! What sort of > feature set were > you looking at building? I'm *very* interested in hearing from new > perspectives on what features whould be useful in an Ant > build tool GUI. </snip> We'll be discussing a feature set here shortly and comparing it to what the Antidote docs already say. If I had to guess, I'd say there's not too much that hasn't been already documented. Our priorities may be different but the requirements should hopefully align closely. <snip> > You best bet for gaining some historical insight is to do a > search here > (http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=ant-dev&r=1&w=2) </snip> Thanks...I went through the entire discussion. Not sure if I retained everything but it was educational. <snip> > > - What is the current timeline for Antidote to become a part of the > > regular > > Ant release? </snip> If things stay on track here, I'd be putting in some regular effort towards enhancing/developing those features of Antidote that we deem critical. This would likely be a short-term thing until we got Antidote to the "usefulness" stage for our own purposes. So what I envision is I could do some of the grunt work while trying to keep aligned to the original spirit envisioned for Antidote. This is just a theory. I'll know more once we've discussed more of the concrete stuff here at my end. <snip> > > - In the more specific sense and more directly related to Ant, is there > > any plans to come up with an XML Schema for Ant? > Very interesting question, which is at the heart of many old Ant > discussions. There is no *official* DTD/Schema for Ant, > primarily because > the current extension mechanism is based on the developer > adding new tags > which would be incompatible with a standard DTD (you will > have to ask the > others in the group why a DTD compatible extension mechanism > wasn't used. I > don't know.). > </snip> After some more research, it looks like there is some moderate DTD support for Ant. There was one attempt to build a definitive DTD and another undocumented Task that seems to generate at least the bare beginnings of a DTD. My preference would be to move towards schema's anyway. I find them more flexible, more intuitive, and easier to work with using existing tools. Maybe for Ant 2.0 (if anyone is listening ;-] ).
