As per Mr. Bodewig's advice, I'm submitting this suggestion to you folks in the hopes that we can work something out in the future...
I'm looking to support a directory structure in my build process that is fairly dynamic. In addition, most of the other developers on this project don't know Ant, and really have no need to, other than to put their source into the build. Currently, every time someone adds a package to the src directory, they then have to wait for me to put a target into the master build file to include their code in the build. Here's my suggestion: I'd like to have the ability to batch the Ant task, using a <fileset> tag and the target specified as an attribute to <ant>, in order to provide implicit inclusion in the build process by just dropping in a generic template build.xml into their package directory. Special cases could then be dealt with on a case-by-case basis, wherein things like special targets could be included by me. Also: I'd like the ability to specify <ant keepenv="true"...>, or something like this, in order to preserve the environment of the child project into the parent's. This would be useful in setting a common build environment from many build.xml files, which would, in turn, help to elegantly support surgical operations like compiling only a certain package, or junit testing it... This is different than using the <property file="filename"/> task, since it also allows the initialization of common <taskdef> and <available> tasks, as well as others. If you'd be so kind, would you please consider these changes in the near future? If needed, I should have some basic code examples of these implementations by the end of today. I could easily email these changes to the list, if desired... Thanks in advance, John Casey
