Stefan Bodewig wrote: > > > * There is a lot - and I mean it - cut/paste reuse between the javac > and the rmic classes. Especially CLASSPATH creation and handling of > extdirs - this should be factored into a different place IMHO. > > Stefan > >
Actually, this cuts to one of the Ant 1.2 requirements I want to propose - and maybe it's already covered. The requirement is that Ant provide a good API and VERY GOOD documentation on it's use so that tasks don't have so much cut and pasted code scattered across the tasks. I have NOT looked at the 1.3 source much, and the 1.2 only some, but every time I try to figure things out by looking at several diffeerent tasks, I seem to see similar or identical code doing the same stuff in multiple places. This makes it hard to re-use, and it must make maintenance a nightmare. Especially important are the things that are needed by many tasks - dealing with CLASSPATHS, dealing with filesets, patternsets, etc. Another requirement, which I believe has been covered, but I'll mention for insurance sake, is the ability to add new tasks to ant by some type of 'drop in' or 'plug in' mechanism that is simple and clean. Having to edit default.properties and re-build the jars just to get a new task to appear built in is not ideal...
