Conor MacNeill wrote: > > MUCH SNIPPED AWAY HERE... > > Personally I too am not happy with the tenor of many discussions on this > list. > > Conor
Neither am I. Which is why I so rarely contribute. I don't know where most of you find time to debate so much! I have real work to get done using Ant as it exists today... Ant has made my life SO much better and easier. And I have (had?) high hopes for Ant 2.0 bringing more value. But, it's beginning to look like there will be an Ant 2.0 discussion in the year 2101 while Ant 1.9999999 is being released.... While the points made by Conor about the committee and the votes are valid and true, my experience is that many wildly successful innovations are spearheaded by a visionary and those who agree with that vision. Whether he was 'right' or 'wrong', Duncan was the visionary at the beginning. I can recall when I first looked at Ant that I thought it was totally inadequate. I came back to it months later, and found it had improved. My recollection is that the hard work of the committers responding to suggestions made it powerful enough to be practical. This was during a period of 'refinement' to Ant as it was then envisioned. Those people certainly deserve a great deal of thanks and credit. But, now that we are debating major issues of a redesign, rather than incremental touch up of an existing design, the loss of a 'visionary' to lead is being felt. Specifically, with the loss of that single vision we are left with a set of competing visions that show no sign of converging to a single vision we can all agree to support. Until we get back to a single vision that we can all agree on, these discussions will go on and on, and Ant will fall further behind where it could be. And it doesn't seem to me that these discussions are bringing us closer to a single vision... -ken P.S. My personal observations is that much of the debate seems to come down to personal choices about how to use Ant. From my perspective, all these differing, conflicting points of view are valid. Since Ant is extensible, and the source code would be available, can't we wrap this up and agree to a core set of functionality that we can all live with? Then people who want to do it THIS way or people who want to do it THAT way can customize it in their shop. Especially if Ant 2.0 makes it easier to customize via plug-ins...
