> "Make" itself is not very well-suited to Java, but _something_ like > it is required, because in any reasonable sized project (including > this one), compiling source is only one tiny part of the tasks that > need build control. One also has to build documents, distributions, > source control/versioning tasks, etc.
Agreed. In one of my previous projects I rebuilt every source file from scratch every time. I used IBM's Jikes compiler (open source and free) which could compile about 1000 java files in 3 seconds on my p2-400 laptop. Not too shabby. Of course there are lots of other tasks that need to be done for builds. You could still use make to do those tasks, or you could use a tool like ant for everything: > I personally like Apache's "ant" tool, even though it's fairly new > and still in development (though that's actually one thing I like-- > its code is small and simple and easy to add features to). It is > good at doing portability tasks like converting newlines in files, > executing OS-specific tasks, etc., and it does take advantage of > Javac's ability to do its own dependency checking. Ant is a great tool and it was designed with Java in mind (among many other things). One thing though, I have yet to see a Java project which builds significantly faster doing incremental (dependency checks) than just compiling all the source from scratch. One nice thing about ant is that you can plug more than one compiler in -- those of us who would prefer the more rigorous standards compliance of Jikes can use that, while those who prefer to use the JDK can use that. Of course you'd want to choose one for your release builds for traceability. As I've been looking for something to do to help contribute, I'll start investigating an Ant-based makefile unless there are objections. Ben Sandee _______________________________________________ Freenet-dev mailing list Freenet-dev at lists.sourceforge.net http://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/freenet-dev
