At 22:34 6/11/2001 +0000, Jose Alberto Fernandez wrote:
What kind of tasks are we talking about. Can someone explain?
My understanding is that there are a *lot* of people that have developed "in-house" tasks for various purposes. (If my Java was a little better, I would have done this myself instead of using antcall and exec so much.)
Since these tasks are "in-house" they aren't publicised and we *cannot* find out about them. We can't be sure that the authors are subscribed to any Ant mailing list or that they read the archives.
So, there are a lot of tasks out there that are absolutely vital to peoples business (where Ant is a real build tool on a real commercial project) and there is NO way to find and contact them all.
Also remember that most people won't read any release notes unless something breaks.
Hence, any change to the Ant API that breaks preexisting tasks is going to piss a lot of users off who won't know anything about the change until their builds stop working - and these builds might just break at a critical time on a project.
Not a good way to build customer confidence or the user base.
Please note that I'm not arguing against your suggestions - nor am I arguing for them as I don't know enough to have a valid opinion. I just putting the case that breakage to backward compatibility needs to occur in places where the regular customer expects it - such as a shift from 1.8 to 2.0.
Cheers, Bevan.
-- "Programming is an Art Form that Fights Back"
Bevan Arps (<mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>[EMAIL PROTECTED]) Senior OO Analyst, ACT Financial Systems
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