Yes, it's strange. I believe there've been discussions to this effect on the list
before, though I can't be sure (being a newbie myself).
Also, it's my impression that this is one of the things that will change in Ant 2.
Under the "Simplicity and Understandability" heading, the Ant2 feature list states:
- add scoping rules for properties so that not all of them will be inherited by
sub-builds, only those that have been specified explicitly. Fill in details once
they've been sorted out.
Any of the ant-dev team wish to comment more on this? It would be nice if properties
worked the way cascading style-sheets do. The inner properties override the outer
ones. But if I read the above correctly (in it's immature form), plans are to
disallow any inheritence in subprojects, unless the property is explicitly included in
the subproject. This almost seems as counter-intuitive as the current system.
Kyle
>>> [EMAIL PROTECTED] 07/05/01 04:15PM >>>
As a new user to ant setting up build files for my first (large) project, one
thing I find very strange and counter-intuitive is the idea that you can't
over-ride the value of properties once they are set.
I have set up a project with some sub-projects that could be stand-alone, but
can also be a called from a "meta" build-file that builds all sub-projects.
If I have variables with the same name in the main build-file they will
over-ride the variable in the sub-build-file.
I find this to be counter-intuitive because it's exactly the opposite of the
way variable scope normally works-- normally "inner" declarations override
"outer" declarations.
Why does it work like this? Does it strike anybody else as strange?
thanks.
