On Wed, 4 Jul 2001 12:33, Ken Wood wrote: > 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....
which is why there are currently forks in progress with possibility of new forks in future. > 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... Well I can't speak for the rest of ant-dev but I generally agree for JDDs original vision with one exception (I believe properties should allowed to be non-strings). The only people I know of who fundamentally disagree with JDDs original design are not committers ... > > -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... It will be able to do that however many people believe that ONLY their opinion is valid and want the rest of us to take up their flag. Cheers, Pete *-----------------------------------------------------* | "Faced with the choice between changing one's mind, | | and proving that there is no need to do so - almost | | everyone gets busy on the proof." | | - John Kenneth Galbraith | *-----------------------------------------------------*
