----- Original Message -----
From: Stefan Bodewig <stefan.bode...@freenet.de>
To: nant-developers@lists.sourceforge.net
Cc:
Sent: Friday, October 28, 2011 2:17 AM
Subject: Re: [nant-dev] Next NAnt/NAntContrib TODO Tasks
On 2011-10-26, Ryan Boggs wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 26, 2011 at 8:53 AM, Stefan Bodewig
> <stefan.bode...@freenet.de> wrote:
>> When I worked on the log4net release I cursed NAnt's lack of a <mapper>
>> so a big +1 for this. I also miss <macrodef>. Badly.
> I should add <macrodef> too, eh?
> This may be my Ant bias. log4net's build file is a big mess of
> copy-paste and I think macrodef would help, but maybe there is a
> NAnt-idiomatic way of fixing that without macrodef. It looks as if
> "call"ing a target is something you'd do more lightly and more often in
> NAnt than in Ant.
In Ant if you "call" a target and return, the variables set in that inner
target aren't available in the outer scope. Therefore you can't easily create
"call"-able, reusable functions that return stuff, you can only create helpful
things that do things. Thus, in Ant, you create insane dependency chains. The
way around this in Ant is <macrodef>.
In NAnt if you "call" something and return, all the variables set in the inner
scope still exist. Therefore I can create helpful "figure out the path"
call-able targets or <foreach> around a call target or intermingle in effect
function calls with pre- and post-processing code.
I find NAnt's paradigm more helpful and easier to understand, though I
understand why Ant chose to scope properties the way it did. In the end,
having an NAnt <macrodef> would be very useful, but it'd be less useful to
those who understand the difference between property scopes between the
products and more useful to people trying to copy/paste functionality from Ant.
Rob
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