> Ok here is the argument about being not such a good idea (in general). > 1) For every contition you need to test in the whole of your buildfile > you need to come up with yet another property that will be use for > testing it. > > 2) Then you need to make sure that all your properties have been tested, > > and those that are not defined because of the test, will never be > defined later > by some other part of your build. > > In escence, it is noce for small things, but for large builds it becomes > a real nightmare. > > What other competing stuff is out there: > > a) Use <if> from antcontrib (more to the point: convice enough comitters > to > get <if> and such inside core, since some people do not like importing > 3rd parties > for such basic functionality. The people against claim is too verbose. > > b) Some have proposed the idea of an evaluation language that can be > used > inside the if/unless attributes. That would allow expressing conplex > conditions > without needing to define properties for each one of them. Also means a > language must be defined or adopted and it must have enough expressing > power. > All this things do not exclude one another, but before we embark on some > direction > we need to think about what will be best for readability, > maintenability, etc. > > Jose Alberto
Thanks for the explanation Jose! I understand the problem with coming up unique property names just to use in an if= or unless=. Why not use 2 approaches? In my opinion <target name="debugstuff" if="debugmode"> ... </target> is quite readable and I would not want to give that up. But using just the existence/nonexistence of a property is useful only in particular instances. Trying to use that approach for all conditional behaviour is a bad idea. Having the <if> task as a core task seems an obvious and good idea to me. That being said, being able to embed <echo if="debugmode"> You are compiling in debug mode </echo> in the middle of a target (without having to make multiple targets) would be pretty cool also. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
