Status Report for the Ant project o Ant 1.5.2
Ant 1.5.2 was released on March 3, 2003 The zip refactoring that was undertaken to eliminate a number of zip/jar update bugs introduced a regression whereby some elements of the produced Zips could not be viewed by WinZIP. This required a followup 1.5.3 release. o Ant 1.5.3 Ant 1.5.3 was released on April 9, 2003. Ant 1.5.3 addresses over 100 bug reports from Ant 1.5.1. It has proved to be a stable release so far. As I stated previously there is not expected to be any further Ant 1.5.x releases. o Ant 1.6 Ant 1.6 is the current development codebase (CVS head). No release plan has been considered for this release. Previously I had expected this to be released around June but now I think this is more likely to be later in the year, say August 2003. Features which are candidates for this release remain: * Some form of task library support, allowing third-party tasks to be more easily packaged, distributed and integrated with Ant. * Support for polymorphic types * Delayed Task construction, Top levels tasks, etc Much development work and significant change in the Ant core has already been committed (namespace support, top-level tasks, plugin capability for property resolution, component creation, etc) o JDK 1.1 support The Ant project has voted to drop the requirement for JDK 1.1 support in the Ant core from 1.6 onwards. This change has been canvassed in the user community and strongly signalled in the Ant 1.5.3 release notes and download pages. The change was strongly supported. It will eliminate the need for messy reflection-based workarounds that had been necessary previously. o ant.apache.org site Since the previous report, the Ant site is now live and the former site under Jakarta redirected. o Bylaws The current bylaws proposal, http://cvs.apache.org/viewcvs.cgi/*checkout*/ant/proposal/ant-site/ is being voted upon by the PMC now. If accepted, the board will be asked to approve the bylaws. We'd be happy to work towards a single Apache-wide project bylaws proposal, if required. o Legal Issues A request has been received from Peter Donald for the assignment of copyright in the Myrmidon codebase. The PMC has voiced no objections to the assignment in principle but I have requested clarification of which code is affected. No response has been received to date. o Outstanding bugs and patches The number of outstanding bugs against Ant has stabilised over the last three months. i.e. the arrival rate generally equals the cleanup rate. There remains, however, a large bug backlog. Two committers have been added to the Ant project which may help in this area. o New committers Two new commiters have been added, Jesse Stockall and Antoine Levy-Lambert. They have shown a long-standing commitment to addressing issues in Ant. Also they willhelp us cover more of the optional Ant tasks. o Community The dev list has been very active discussing the requirements and implementation of antlibs, the consequences for dynamic typing and polymorphism in Ant. The disccusion has addressed issues such as XML namespace usage and its relation to antlibs, etc. I think some consensus is emerging. While active, the discussion has not been heated and the community appears healthy. Likewise the user list is very active and healthy. Conor