Hi all,
[ big snip of stuff ]
>
> No, just a significant amount of frustration.
>
> [I'm drawing text from another response of yours to this same thread]
>
> You claim that Peter Vogel is "just droning the same stuff". How many
> people need to drone the same request before ant-dev considers it a
> reasonable request? The diversions you provide into natural language
> theory are interesting, but don't have much relevance to the topic at
> hand.
I'm going to have to agree with Peter D here. One of the frustrations
that I have with Ant is that it's _not_ consistent. I would like it to
be just a transformation language, and not a scripting language, but it
has this weird mish-mash of declarative, conditional and flow. That
makes it super hard to learn.
>
> You state: "I am a believer in doing one thing well. Currently ant does
> too many scripty things and encourages too many bad practices. These
> will hopefully be eliminated in ant2 but who can tell at this stage."
>
> I question, then, what is it that ant is supposed to do well? I had
> thought is was a build management system. How does adding flow control
> (which a number of people have stated is needed for build management)
> somehow break the purity of ant. I know that I'm repeating a previous
> statement, but what good is a "pure" tool that doesn't address the needs
> of the community it is supposed to serve?
If you want a scripting tool, then I suggest that you try make, jmake or
another derivative, or heaven forbid, take the source-code of ant, and
create Scripty-Ant(tm) ;-).
I agree with you that the majority of the users wish to have flow control
via if/then/else and looping constructs. I agree with Peter D that they
probably don't know what they are asking for. If all you've got is a
hammer, then everything looks like a nail.
People need to understand that running a project like this is hard,
very hard, and takes up lots of time. As a maintainer and developer
of an open source effort, you get lots of "complaints" and very little
positive assistance or feedback. Occasionally, when you've heard the
same thing a few times, then you can get snippy, we are human after all.
So, my advice is :
a) show some patience on both sides
b) let the ant-dev team take ant where _they_ want it to go and if you
don't like the direction, choose another boat.
Cheers,
-- jon
--
Jon Eaves <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
http://www.eaves.org/jon/
