As well, Ant already has an xml format for it's properties. See http://ant.apache.org/manual/CoreTasks/xmlproperty.html -- dIon Gillard, Multitask Consulting Blog: http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/dion/ Work: http://www.multitask.com.au
Rafal Krzewski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote on 27/06/2003 06:20:10 PM: > [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > >>We also need it for documentation. Its quite common for people to ask > >>'what property do I set to do....' because there are so many > >>undocumented properties. If there was a metadata file that described > >>plugin properties, it could be used to generate the xdocs. > > > > There is one. It's called plugin.properties, and it can be used to > > generate the xdocs :-) > > We could probably make a contract that the comment block directly above > the property contains it's description, but I'm not sure if this is > what we really want? > > Generating an xdoc from the property files itself has an advantage > of "on the spot" documentation, just like JavaDoc - you can read it in > the Java source, but also in the generated HTML pages. We also don't > have two files that need to be kept in sync (humans *always* forget...) > > We could go the other way around, and generated plugin.properties files > from the metadata, to lift the need for synchronizing files. > Descriptions in the metadata file could be emmited into the file as > well. The metadata file would be xml (seems natural to me), so we > could have a schema for it and take advantage of validation. On the > other hand, should we really introduce a new format for specifying > properties? > > Given the choice I'd probably stay with .properties files only, > and write the PropertyDoc thingy. > > > The reason the documentation is lacking is noone has been willing to > > do it. > > True. No matter which way we go - metadata files, or "PropertiesDoc" > plugin maintainers will have to fill in the descriptions anyway... > > R. > > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] >
