On 19 Jul 2011, at 14:58, Eric Douglas wrote: Hi Eric
As already mentioned by Mehdi and Benson, unless you are really serious about debugging the Ant source code, it is probably preferable to only reference a binary. Some more thoughts on the inter-depencies (ultimately circular, yes, but no real issue, unless you absolutely want to compile *everything* from the sources): > If I try to compile fop source it says it requires ant. That is strictly speaking not a 'hard requirement', in the sense that FOP does not absolutely need Ant to work correctly. The only classes in FOP with dependencies on Ant are located in org.apache.fop.tools.anttask. If you do not need FOP's Ant task functionality, it is conceivable to compile FOP without it, and thus remove the dependency... The reason we, fop-devs, do not stumble over it, is likely because we are used to running FOP's Ant build, either from the command-line or from within the IDE. That presupposes that Ant is already available on the classpath, so the link from org.apache.fop.tools.anttask is satisfied. I do remember having to explicitly include ant.jar for using the compile/make functionality in my IDE directly, though, so it is not unknown. > If I download the source for ant and try to compile it says it requires bsf. > If I download the source for bsf and try to compile it says it requires > jython. > If I download the source for jython and try to compile it says it requires > ant. Very likely (unchecked in detail) a similar story here: Jython probably references Ant only in its own ant.Task subclasses (org.python.util.JythoncAntTask, org.python.util.JycompileAntTask, etc.?) Hope this explains it somewhat. Andreas ---
