Re: [nant-dev] .Net 2.0 Task dlls

[Gary Feldman]

Tony McCreath wrote:
> I've just upgraded to .Net 2.0 and in the process converted my NAnt tasks.
>
> However, NAnt (0.85) cannot read these tasks once compiled into .Net 2.0!
>
> I am specifying -t:net-2.0
>   
Have you tried changing the default framework in NAnt.exe.config?

Gary



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Re: [nant-dev] Nant contributions or where nant is going?

[Gary Feldman]

Martin Aliger wrote:
> Uhm. I'm not sure, I know what you are speaking about. You're refering to IM
> (instant messaging) itself? The purpose of the miranda program is irrelevant
> in my referal. I just like their web site layout, ideas and mainly addons
> site. I think NAnt's task site should be simmilar. Some tree structure with
> short info and download link to assembly+readme+external dependencies zip.
> Assembly contaning one (or few simmilar) task(s) like say  or .
> Ideal for users IMHO. Support board forum for each of those tasks would be
> superb! For core development, this list is ideal on the other hand. 
>
>   
Ah, that makes things clearer.  I had no idea you were talking about the 
web site and not the product.

Their addons site looks vaguely like Trac or Jira.  I don't know that we 
should go as far as hosting such
stuff on some place other than Sourceforge, though there are projects 
that do divide their resources
between Sourceforge and elsewhere (like CC.Net). 

But coming up with a category-based page for either the contributed 
tasks or all of them seems like a
good idea.

Gary



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Re: [nant-dev] Nant contributions or where nant is going?

[Gary Feldman]

[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> Like this email list.
>   
No, email is synchronous - you get to choose when to read email (except 
when that's a job requirement).  IM on the other hand is intended for 
immediate response.

Gary



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Re: [nant-dev] Nant contributions or where nant is going?

[Gary Feldman]

Martin Aliger wrote:
> This is another thing worth of "implementation" under 1.0.
>
> I'd like something like Miranda-IM has. See http://www.miranda-im.org/ and
> their "Addons" site.
>   
That's a nice idea, but I can't imagine how to justify putting it into 
1.0. 

Besides, I've never been very fond of asynchronous work interruptions.  
People are much more efficient if they're not distracted by such things.

Gary



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Re: [nant-dev] Release 0.85 and beyond

[Gary Feldman]

Gert Driesen wrote:
>  
>> rom: [EMAIL PROTECTED] 
>> [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On 
>> Behalf Of Martin Aliger
>> Hello,
>>
>> agreed - 1.0 soon is a good thing. I see only one big thing 
>> which we should
>> addess in 1.0: VS2005 projects. Or MSBuild cooperation. The 
>> same thing.
>>
>> Since many developers are migrating (or already using) 
>> framework 2.0 in
>> VS2005 and we (currently) do not provide direct tools for 
>> projects it uses,
>> they could either: use plain msbuild (deserters!) or use core
>> tasks-csc,regasm etc (and maintain both .csproj and .build) 
>> or (as most of
>> them do today)  msbuild.exe to their .csproj file (and 
>> give up project
>> dependancy resolution and other  features)
>> 
>
> Are people really waiting for this ?
>
> Shouldn't we focus on improving NAnt ?
>   
Supporting VS 2005 one way or another is improving NAnt.
>> As I see it, we could:
>> 1/ state, that new project files used on VS2005 are unsupported
>> 2/ write new task which handles it somehow (aka  or
>> )
>> 3/ merge required code into current  task
>> 
>
> We already have an  task in NAntContrib.
>   
I think we should just move  into the main kit.  Quick and easy.

As with versions and version numbers, this sort of packaging decision is 
largely marketing driven.  It belongs there not because of any abstract 
standard concerning what is core and what is optional, but rather 
because having msbuild work out of the box is a requirement to get 
people to use it.
>> Maybe 2 distributions: 1.0 compatible, and 2.0, compiled for 
>> 2.0 and with
>> additional features?
>> 
> This might create too much confusion for (some) users, no ?
>   
I agree.  I suppose it could be hidden by an installation kit, but 
installations are a royal pain.  On the other hand, is it really 
necessary to continue to run under 1.1?  I realize it must continue to 
allow 1.1 as a target, but I thought that it can still do that as a 2.0 
exe.  I don't know how that affects Mono.  (I'm not at all sure that 
there's any requirement for 1.0; I thought that got tossed away 
relatively quickly.)

Are there any problems with requiring .Net 2.0?  There's enough value in 
it that we ought to encourage people to upgrade.  (But maybe I'm biased 
because we're exploiting the new stream encryption features - and I'm 
big on security features.)

Gary




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[nant-dev] Release 0.85 and beyond

[Gary Feldman]

It's now been almost 6 weeks since rc4 came out.

There are three open bugs filed since then, none of which are 
showstoppers in my opinion.  There are two others closed and one deleted.

There are a couple of problems reporting in the mailing list since then, 
some of which seem significant to me.  However, basing release decisions 
on items discussed in the mailing lists and not entered into the tracker 
is a road to chaos.  It's a hard line, but somebody has got to draw it :-)

My conclusion is that rc4 should be retagged as 0.85 final and announced 
as such.  After that, I think two things need to be discussed:

   1.  What will constitute 1.0, and what is the roadmap to get to it?
   2.  Is a bug fix build needed before then?

Personally, I think NAnt is in good enough shape to timebox requests for 
features and mandatory fixes in 1.0.  In other words, set a deadline of 
Aug 15 (for example - I don't mean to be declaring dates unilaterally) 
for requests to come in.  Two weeks later, have a final set of bugs and 
features targeted for 1.0, and a target date for rc1. Obviously show 
stoppers found after the first date can be added to the list; that date 
just raises the bar for consideration.  Ideally, I'd like to see 1.0 
final by the end of the year, better yet by October.

My perspective on this is that releases and release numbers are largely 
a marketing decision, not engineering.  In this case, I think it's 
important to maintain momentum and credibility against msbuild.  
Otherwise, the community of users won't grow, and hence the community of 
contributors won't grow.

Gary





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Re: [nant-dev] New custom task

[Gary Feldman]

Ramya Niranjan wrote:
> In RC3 I see that there is not task to sort a directory for
>subdirectories/files matching a search pattern (wildcard). I have 
> created
>one such custom task and tested the same. This works fine. Please 
> let me
>know if I could submit this code as a part of the NAnt contribution 
> task?
>Thanks and Regards,
>Niranjan
As already indicated, you should submit this to nantcontrib.

However, first you should clarify what it does.  Does it produce a 
sorted listing of a fileset?  Or is sort the wrong word, and you really 
meant search? 

Gary



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[nant-dev] task oddity

[Gary Feldman]

I just factored out a build file snippet into a separate target, 
changing the  task containing the snippet to an if= attribute 
on the new target.  Much to my surprise, the  task within the 
snippet stopped working.

Doing this triggered my memory, and sure enough the documentation says 
that  must be at the top level.  Hence


   


fails.  However,


  

  


not only works just fine, but does exactly what I want it to do. 

So the question is why can't it be made to work anywhere?  I know the 
 task has been discussed before, resulting in some 
clarification in the docs, but I don't recall any discussion as to why 
it must work this way.

And whatever you do, don't fix it so that this no longer works :-).  I'm 
depending upon this behavior.  (I could work around it, but it's an 
annoying complication.)

Gary



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Re: [nant-dev] HTTP PUT/FTP task

[Gary Feldman]

Martin Aliger wrote:

Hello,
 
I'm looking for ftp and/or http put task. And as good as I look for 
it, I don't see any! I believe there was some work on FTP task! I 
check both NAnt's and NAntContrib's latest online documentaions and I 
found only  task for getting the file. I need to upload one.
 
If there is really not such task yet, I'm willing to contribute one, 
of course. But I believe there have to be 1 for such common task already!
Because of the security issues involved - i.e., you don't want to store 
a password in your build file -- you may be better off mounting the 
remote drive and using the NAnt copy task.  Alternatively, I'd consider 
using scp (secure copy) with the exec task.  Indeed, I'd rather see NAnt 
have a secure="yes" attribute on the  task than get into 
ftp/http.  If you were to do ftp/http, it would be cleaner to implement 
them as protocols read by the  task, i.e. if I said 
to="ftp://some.file.path"; for the copy task, it would automatically use 
ftp (or any other standard protocol for which copying makes sense).


As it happens, I use a separate Python ftp job for uploading kits to a 
third party.  It gives me more control over the information flowing back 
and forth than I would with a NAnt  of ftp.  This lets me check 
for name clashes, etc.  Still, I'm not sure that this need is really 
that common.  NAnt is primarily for building, and all the systems 
involved in a build are usually on the same local net, with direct copy 
available.


Gary



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Re: [nant-dev] pkg-config like system for visual c++

[Gary Feldman]

LievenQ wrote:
The problem is that visual studio doesn't have a system like 
pkg-config. To solve this, I was thinking about creating a pkg-config 
like system for visual studio myself. The package files would be 
simple visual c++ 2005 proprety sheets, so that they are fully 
supported with visual studio by itself. These property sheets should 
be placed in a folder, and my task will then look up packages in that 
folder, and use the appropriate property sheets.


How are you planning on generating the property sheets?  With 
pkg-config, they're usually generated by the configure utility or similar.
Now I'm not sure in which folder I should place these property sheets 
though. I could create a subfolder in the nant directory, but I don't 
think that would be a good idea, because those files aren't really 
part of nant itself. I could also create a folder in the root, but 
that wouldn't be too polite to the user's system. Program Files maybe? 
Anybody got another suggestion?
I think you hinted on the right direction above, when you said you were 
thinking about creating a pkg-config like system.  That means you should 
be thinking in terms of win-pkg-config (to coin a name), instead of NAnt. 

I'm also wondering why you think this is important or useful.  It's 
useful in the GNU configure/auto-conf, because there are many packages 
generated that way, so that the configuration files can be provided with 
the kit and installed into the pkg-config lib directory.  I don't know 
that there are many Visual C++ users who will be building against such 
packages, but if there are, you need to use the config files that come 
with them, i.e. pkg-config syntax, not property files.  On the other 
hand, if you're thinking about packages that are intended for VC++ 
development, I'd expect Visual Studio project and/or solution files to 
be the approach.


Gary



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Re: [nant-dev] Bug tracking status

[Gary Feldman]

Gert Driesen wrote:




Gary, were you able to reproduce this issue ? It's working fine here.

I think that the issue described by the submitter is due to the way command
line arguments for batch files are processed, and as such this has nothing
to do with NAnt itself.
 


I didn't try, because my intuition agrees with your analysis.


I'd still prefer to have one more release candidate before we ship a new
final release.

 

OK, but let's pick a time frame for the interval between that and the 
real release, along with a policy of no checkins (on the trunk) during 
that period except for showstoppers.


Gary




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[nant-dev] Bug tracking status

[Gary Feldman]

There are currently no open P9 bugs.  Only two bugs were submitted in
the first half of May, nine in all of April.  Of the nine in April, two
were duplicates, one had already been fixed, one was user error, one has
been fixed, two are pending more information.  I've marked one of them
postponed, because I don't believe it's needed for 0.85.  Only one of
the two May bugs looks like it needs to be addressed (1481841 exec
task's commandline and arg eat = signs
 


), but I suspect that  can be made to work.

In my opinion, that's enough to close out 0.85 and release it.  Granted,
I'm exploiting the fact that the default priority is 5, not 9.
Nevertheless, 0.85 is still a pre-1.0 version number and there's more
noise about getting a new release out than fixing any particular bug.
Furthermore, a release is really necessary at this time to maintain
credibility against MSbuild.

Therefore, I propose that the next full build be declared the 0.85 final
release, and that 0.86 be opened.  The only exception to this would be
any identified showstoppers, where showstopper is defined as:  a) it
affects most NAnt users; b) there is no workaround; and either c1) it
prevents using NAnt for its primary purpose (building .Net projects) or
c2) the fix would break many existing build files.  I can even be
convinced to remove c2, but I doubt that's an issue.

Gary





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Re: [nant-dev] The system cannot find the path specified

[Gary Feldman]

Ahmed, Shabana wrote:

I am not sure if this is how I get tot he verbose. But, I got the 
latest nightly build and this is the error I get. I am still unable to 
build the examples. Please let me know what u think. Thanks.
 
 
C:\work\nant\bin>nant.exe -verbose


Offhand, I'd say this is the wrong directory to be in.  If you're going 
to run the examples, then you should either start in the examples 
directory or pass the full path of the examples build file on the 
command line.


Gary


NAnt 0.85 (Build 0.85.2296.0; nightly; 4/15/2006)
Copyright (C) 2001-2006 Gerry Shaw
http://nant.sourceforge.net

BUILD FAILED
Could not find a '*.build' file in 'C:\work\nant\bin'
For more information regarding the cause of the build failure, run the 
build aga

in in debug mode.


*From:* Gert Driesen [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
*Sent:* Fri 4/21/2006 12:19 PM
*To:* Ahmed, Shabana; nant-developers@lists.sourceforge.net
*Subject:* RE: [nant-dev] The system cannot find the path specified

Ahmed,

Please provide a verbose build log (NAnt.exe -verbose).

Also, I suggest upgrading to a recent nightly build
(http://nant.sourceforge.net/nightly/latest).

Gert

> -Original Message-
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On
> Behalf Of Ahmed, Shabana
> Sent: vrijdag 21 april 2006 18:14
> To: nant-developers@lists.sourceforge.net
> Subject: [nant-dev] The system cannot find the path specified
>
> Has anyone ever encountered this error saying "The system
> cannot find the path specified" when you try to run any of
> the examples that come with NANT, like say hello world. I
> have Nant set up on my pc at c:\nant\0.84. I also set the
> path in the environment variables to the c:\nant\0.84\bin. I
> do the following at command prompt.
> 
> Navigate to c:\nant\0.84\bin\nant-help. This works fine. But

> when I do this
> 
> c:\nant\0.84\examples\helloworld\nant or

> c:\nant\0.84\examples\nant. I get the following error. The
> system cannot find the path specified.
> 
> The strangest thing is this. I did the same untill noon

> yesterday and it worked fine. I mean it performed the build.
> But form evening yesterday, I keep getting this error. I have
> pondered over but no clue yet. So, I though let me see if you
> guys had a similar issue ever.
> 
>   I  have uninstalled Nant, reinstalled, restarted my pc,

> reset the path variable. But, no luck yet. Please do let me
> know if you have any suggestions. I also tried:
> 
> C:\nant\0.84\examples\nant -buildfile:examples.build. It give

> the same damn error.
> 
> Please let me know if anything occurs to you.
> 
> Thanks a lot,

> Shabana
>







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Re: [nant-dev] [ANN] A collection of nAnt goodness (nAnt tasks, types, and functions)

[Gary Feldman]

Jay Flowers wrote:

I have been accumulating nAnt tasks, types, and functions for a 
while.  I had asked on the nAnt dev group if they would like to 
include them but received no


Two points: 

First, contributions like this should really be taken to the NAntContrib 
developers mailing list.  See 
http://sourceforge.net/mail/?group_id=54790 to sign up or read the 
archives.  Granted, the responsiveness there isn't better than it is 
here, but it is the right place for contributions to be discussed, at 
least for now.


Second, you've somehow managed to get gmail to set the To: field to 
"undisclosed recipients."  That makes it harder for people to send 
responses to the list (where they belong) than just to you.  Please 
check to see if that can be fixed for future contributions to the list.


I realize that neither of these comments are what you wanted.  Right 
now, the primary maintainers of NAnt are very busy, so progress is slow, 
but that doesn't mean that people aren't interested or appreciative.


Thanks,

Gary

response.  The list seems to go through periods where users submit 
patches and enhancements but I see no evidence of the project 
leader(s) integrating them into the code line.  The project has not 
released in quite a long time.  So I have decided to release some nAnt 
extensions of my own.  A link to the release page can be found on my 
home page jayflowers.com .  Below is a quick 
example of some of the tasks, types, and functions.


< strings id=" Numbers">

< string value="2" />








< echo message="Added number 5 to StringList, count = 
${stringlist::count('Numbers')}. "/>


< elseif if="false" >










< loopthrough property="Number" >









--
Jay Flowers
--
http://jayflowers.com
- 






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Re: [nant-dev] XmlPeekTask extention

[Gary Feldman]

Martin Aliger wrote:


Reasoning:
There are scenarios where you have to test, whether some element/attribute
is present in the xml. Its _not_ an error, if such element/attribute is
missing. Since xmlpeek task report it via exception, and even with
failonerror set it is considered error, blaming nant users with false
errors.

I'm open to any changes/expansions to this. Maybe defaultValue="whatever" is
better? (and use this value if no match found?)
 

As long as you're brainstorming options, another approach could be to 
simply undefine the variable.  (I'm not sure if that's even possible in 
NAnt.)


In 90% of the cases, the user can first set the property to some 
well-defined "null" value, run the task, and check the result.  For 
example, if you know the value you're fetching is supposed to be a 
number, you could use the string "missing" as the default value, and use 
a simple comparison to see whether or not the peek succeeded.  The only 
time this wouldn't work is if there are absolutely no constraints on the 
possible data values, so that there's no way to pick a "null" value.  
Since the defaultValue attribute has the same problem, I don't see any 
advantage to it over simply setting the property to the default value in 
advance, and my preference is avoid introducing attributes when there's 
an easy alternative.


Finally, I'd really like to see the default behavior changed to not 
cause a failure.  The current behavior seems to violate the principle of 
least surprise, at least to me.  Besides, you can usually do a better 
job with the error message, by simply detecting the failure and using 
your own  with wording more appropriate to the situation.


Gary




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Re: [nant-dev] writing the NAnt output to a log file ??

[Gary Feldman]

Martin Aliger wrote:


Ah, you want to suppress standard logging too... Hmm - there is not an
attribute to do that.  task always log all standard output as Info
level messages, and standard error as Warning level messages.

NAnt always write all messages up to level Info when run normally, up to
level Verbose when with -v switch or just to Warning level when in quiet
mode. AFAIK there is no other mean of control over this in standard
distribution (I propose some patches to this, but they wasn't accepted yet).


Gert, Ian, others - what you think about more control over verbosity? It'd
be nice sometimes. Even that I do not have problem with it any longer (since
I switch to xmllogger+xslt templates), Pradeep and propably others would
welcome it. Maybe publishing Threshold Task property could be enough, enable
lowering threshold for specific tasks.



 

Why make this so complicated?  If the user specified output= to the 
 task, then the output goes there and nowhere else, period.  If 
the user wants that in the log as well, then they can still do that 
using  and  (though enhancing  to take the message 
from a file isn't a bad idea). 

But if the user has made the decision to direct the output somewhere 
else, there must be a reason, most often because it's either irrelevant 
to the build process or too verbose.  In the first case, it should be 
totally suppressed from the NAnt log, and in the second case, it's far 
more likely the user will want a filter on it.   In that case, the 
loadfile/echo, along with a new grep filter, solve the problem with much 
more flexibility, and without hobbling the most common usage scenario 
for the output attribute.


Are there any common usage scenarios for needing the entire output in 
both places?  I can't think of any.


Gary


Martin


 _  

From: chellu pradeep [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] 
Sent: Sunday, December 11, 2005 4:26 PM

To: Martin Aliger
Subject: RE: [nant-dev] writing the NAnt output to a log file ??


even after i use  task's output attribute i can see the result on the
command prompt screen as well as the output gets logged onto a log file. Am
i missing something here?

NOTE: I am using NAnt 0.85 rc3 and NantContrib 0.85 rc3

--Pradeep

Martin Aliger <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: 


  

This will never work. ">" sign is shell (cmd.exe) special handling, its not
common to process running. NAnt's  task have special attribute for
file-redirection. See
http://nant.sourceforge.net/nightly/latest/help/tasks/exec.html expecially
output and append attributes.

Martin




 _  


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Re: [nant-dev] Using ${x} but as a string

[Gary Feldman]

Daniel Halan wrote:

I cant seem to find any info on how one could use ${xx} without it 
tried to be replaced by a var.


Meaning I would want the ${xx} to be left alone...

Was checking the source code but it seems that there is no handling 
for it (PropertyDictionary.cs, L:330).

A good

So I tried to add a skip check for $${xx}, but when I replace the 
NAnt.Core.dll in the nant dir I get this error...


Using $${xx} resulted in "$${xx}" for me (using a July 24 build).

Using ${'${xx}'}  seems to do what you want.

Gary




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Re: [nant-dev] Error while integrating ncover into dailybuild with nant.

[Gary Feldman]

Morris, Jason wrote:


Where did you get NCover from?

http://ncover.org/

- or -

http://ncover.sourceforge.net/ 


IIRC, I had this problem when I used the version from SourceForge, but
if you go to ncover.org, that version seems to work a lot better.  Plus,
I found ncover.org's version integrated with nAnt a lot easier.
 

I've been using the ncover.org version as well, but I wasn't aware of 
any integration.  I've resorted to a painstakingly constructed exec 
task.  (It's painstaking because I'm using NCover to invoke 
nunit-console, which in turn invokes the tests, so there are several 
levels of quoting needed in the commandline attribute.)


I believe the Sourceforge version comes with a NAnt task, but I haven't 
seen any in the NCover.org version.  If there is one, where can I find it?



Jason

PS  I don't know the history of this project, so I don't know why the
differences in code between the two projects with the same name.
 

I've always presumed that the projects were always independent, and just 
happened to use the same name without realizing that someone else was 
also using it.  For what it's worth, the NCover.org version began life 
on GotDotNet, but at least at that time, GotDotNet lacked the stability 
and convenience needed for multi-person open source development.


It would be nice if they resolved the name conflict.  Flip a coin, hold 
a charity auction (whichever one raises the most gets to decide), or 
duel at twenty paces - I don't care how it's resolved as long as it's 
resolved.  Or the market could decide by abandoning one of them.


Gary



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Re: [nant-dev] Re: [Nant-users] Build target from command line without dependencies

[Gary Feldman]

Troy Laurin wrote:


On 9/20/05, Gary Feldman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
 


but on the other hand there are some
things that make can do easily, but which are tricky or more work to do
in NAnt - such as adding a project-wide pre or post compile step.
   



That actually sounds like a good idea... do you think there would be
demand for an AOP-style framework for NAnt, so tasks can be extended
by registering pre- and post-task event listeners  which can inspect
the task's parameters and optionally modify those parameters, or
trigger some other action?
 

I don't think that AOP has crossed the chasm yet, and the way it 
violates the principle of locality of reference makes me wonder whether 
it's appropriate for the typical NAnt user.  Another idea might be to 
just have a mechanism to set defaults.  For example,


   
   value="OURSYMBOL=1;BUILDTYPE='nightly'" />

   

This also violates locality of reference, but in a way that I think 
attracts more attention and is easier to remember. 


Gary


I can't think of a useful example off the top of my head,
unfortunately.  Would anyone else find this useful in some way?

 






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Re: [nant-dev] Fwd: Filesets referencing filesets ?

[Gary Feldman]

Gert Driesen wrote:


...

- what should happen, if referenced fileset have another basedir ?
- what should happen, if exclude/include of 2 filesets conflicts ?
- is every possible combination of those covered in test cases?
For mine use, I dont combine basedirs and dont use excludes at all, but
those problems should be solved. I feel, this is main problem why this
extension wasnt incorporated yet. Maybe we could discuss it now...
 



I agree, these problems should be resolved before we introduce this feature.


I agree, too.  Otherwise it will be impossible to test and chaos around 
the expected results will ensue.



I'm tempted to include it and let people have a play with it and then
refine it as necessary rather than holding out until its perfect. What
do people think ?
   



I'd rather have a more general approach, where all global types implement
support for merging two distinct instances.



Is this meaningful for all types?  Or just those that are collections?  
Does it make sense, for example, to talk about merging two proxies?



Also, I'm not sure if this is something we should introduce this late in the
game.


I am sure - it's not.  Once a release candidate has gone out the door, 
with the intent of a final release soon thereafter, only bug fixes 
should go in.  No feature requests, enhancements, etc.  Sometimes 
there's a gray area as to whether something is a bug fix or an 
enhancement, but I think this is clearly the latter.


Gary





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Re: [nant-dev] Problem with dashes in command line

[Gary Feldman]

Byrd, Payton wrote:

I have been encountering a problem in using NAnt that is not 
necessarily a bug in NAnt, but just a real-world inconvenience brought 
on by Word.


We create deployment documents in Word to describe deployment 
instructions.  Whenever we add a command line option such as -v word 
changes the hyphen to an elongated hyphen.  Our deployers prefer to 
cut and past command lines from the deployment document to prevent 
accidents.  Would it be possible to have the NAnt command line parser 
updated to accept another character, such as the tilde or forward 
slash to denote a flag in the command line?



Have you tried a forward slash?  You'll be pleasantly surprised.

Gary




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Re: [nant-dev] Redirecting exec output to stdout

[Gary Feldman]

Kevin wrote:


Hello Everyone,

I just joined this list.

I’m working on a program that will spawn NAnt, and what I really want 
to do is to be able to capture all of the output from all of the 
executable programs that NAnt spawns. The reason why I want to do this 
is because I want to provide my users will real-time information about 
what NAnt is doing.


...

I don’t think there’s any way to do this currently. Please tell me if 
I’m wrong. If NAnt captured its spawned exec’s output and sent it to 
its own stdout, then I could capture the output from my program before 
NAnt finished executing. I looked at the source briefly, and to me it 
looks like some sort of change would need to be made to


I'm not sure what the problem is that you're trying to solve. NAnt 
already collects stdout from programs it execs, and puts it into the log 
on its stdout - unfortunately with [exec] prefixes on all of it. How 
exactly is the current behavior wrong for you?


Gary




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Re: [nant-dev] Re: [Nant-users] Problem with exec and input redirection to file

[Gary Feldman]

Troy Laurin wrote:


I have no issues with making the shell configurable, that's definitely
a Good Idea, although the actual nature of how to configure it would
probably need discussion.  Would it be a normal (magical) property, or
a special parameter like the logger?  Presumably it could be
overridden locally by the exec task itself?

 


What's wrong with

  

where the shell attribute is optional?


I'm not sure that I understand what you mean by using an external
script to run multiple programs, but if I do then I don't think I
agree with you...  if the programs are chained in a single expression,
then that could be encapsulated in a single  call (delegating to
the shell).  


That's the case I'm talking about.  It's the difference between

   

and
  
where I'm taking liberties with the syntax, since exec today can only 
take one program.



If there are several programs to be run in some order,
then that's flow control, which I think is more part of NAnt's
territory, so makes more sense to use multiple  calls.  The only
 

Flow control is in the territory of every procedural language.  I don't 
see why to favor NAnt for it.



exception to this last that I can think of is where you want the
combined output from each program to be concatenated into a single
file - this (intent) would probably be more obvious with a single
 call catching the output than with multiple  calls with
the same output (does exec even support appending to the output file
rather than overwriting?)
 


Actually, it does:  append={"True"|"False"} is an option.


An example of the first... say there's a legacy script which lists all
the files in a directory, sends it to a perl script for processing,
then pipes the result through an ftp client.  The easiest way for this
to be ported to NAnt is if it could be brought across intact:


If NAnt were to introduce pipe support, then this could be split into
multiple execs and dependence on the shell would be diminished...



 

But if you do it this way, there's virtually no difference between using 
a pipe and using a temporary file, at least as far as the way it's 
written.  You could just as easily say output="${temp}/ftp1", etc.  The 
only issue is cleaning up the files, which can be handled by using one 
of a number of possible temp directories.  But my point is that it's 
still clearer to write


 

and let the FtpFilesToRemoteNode contain
  ls | perl makeftpscript.pl | ftp



In this example, using NAnt pipes rather than a single exec probably
decreases maintainability of the script by itself, by increasing cut
and paste (in the pipe names)... but the idea is to add extra
opportunities to improve the script - perhaps the perl script could be
replaced with a NAnt script element in C# (or whatever is the
incumbent language in the organisation), reducing the number of
scripts to track and maintain, and the number of languages in the mix
- slowly improving the maintainability.

 

I don't agree with either of those as valid measures.  Try to keep the 
number of scripts to a minimum is what leads to monolithic scripts on 
the UNIX side, which are not particularly maintainable.  A better 
measure is how much text, not how many files the text is spread across.  
This is similar to the design philosophy of having each object 
responsible for just one thing, with a multitude of very simple objects.


As for languages, I've always felt that software engineers should be 
fluent in several.  While I don't think there should be a multitude of 
redundant languages - i.e., pick just one of Perl, Python, or Ruby - I 
also don't believe there's enough overlap between NAnt and most other 
languages or that NAnt is functional enough to justify using a NAnt as a 
replacement for anything more than cmd.exe.



Also, pipes could allow the circumstance mentioned above (multiple
programs whose output is combined into a single file) to be naturally
performed in NAnt:






 


As indicated above,
  
  
already works, and is shorter.

Gary




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Re: [nant-dev] patch for FileSet extension

[Gary Feldman]

Martin Aliger wrote:
(Regardless of what the decision is, the test cases need to 
include all combinations of asis, include, exclude, fromdir, 
relative basedir, absolute basedir, and omitted basedir.)
   

That would be really nice. Unfortunatelly possible combinations grow with
factorial - noone have time to write all those testcases. But I'll try to
write a little more of them.
 

It's not that many test cases, particularly since you can test different 
combinations of include within one fileset and you can repeat the 
contents of the fileset for different basedirs - maybe a dozen or two. 

In any event, tests aren't optional.  Without the tests, you can't be 
sure of the behavior in these cases, and if you're not sure, it's not 
ready to ship.

Gary

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Re: [nant-dev] patch for FileSet extension

[Gary Feldman]

Martin Aliger wrote:
Hi Gary,
as I implemented it, it converts scanned files from first fileset to full
path asis includes. So









becomes






To your question with excludes:
- all excludes in foo1 are respected.
- no exclude in foo2 take effect on included files. Thats something which is
already in place. Excludes do _not_ affect asis includes. It sounds a little
strange to me, but I'd rather not change something what is in place for
several years.
Is this behaviour right? Maybe yes. I think about  like
fileset merging operation - so you merge existing fileset with some
include/exclude mask. But I see, there is no way how to filter out existing
fileset to another one... So maybe its not right way? Ideas?
Note: reason why I used asis is to prevent double-scan. asis includes are
not scanned anymore, and all included files via includesfileset was scanned
once already.
 

Interesting.  I think there is an opportunity for optimizing this, to 
eliminate the asis by changing the synchronization point.  For example, 
if the contents of the foo1 fileset were not computed until actually 
needed, then you could do away with the asis and apply the exclude.

Part of the problem is that asis seems to violate the principle of one 
method/class/object/parameter should do one thing.  It's doing three 
things:  suppressing the existence check, suppressing the application of 
excludes, and suppressing the pattern matching (in case you were on a 
file system silly enough to allow asterisks in the file name).  I doubt 
the last is necessary; it could just be poor wording in the 
documentation.  I don't know if there's a justification for suppressing 
the excludes.

What happens if you remove the implicit asis that you generate, and 
instead insert explicit asis attributes into the foo1 fileset?  
(Regardless of what the decision is, the test cases need to include all 
combinations of asis, include, exclude, fromdir, relative basedir, 
absolute basedir, and omitted basedir.)

Gary

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Re: [nant-dev] patch for FileSet extension

[Gary Feldman]

Martin Aliger wrote:
Hi all,
 
Attached is patch and test-case for extension for  type. It 
allows to include another fileset in current one. E.g.:
 
What does it do in the presence of excludes?  There are at least two 
cases, one where the included fileset has an exclude - which should not 
affect anything else in the fileset doing the including.  But if the 
fileset doing the including has an exclude, it's not obvious what the 
correct behavior should be.  I think it should exclude things from the 
included fileset as well.

Gary

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Re: [nant-dev] Calling sn.exe for creating a assembly key file from NAnt Target using

[Gary Feldman]

Marcin Hoppe wrote:
On 4/29/05, Shelly Midha <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
 

..
   
 
 
 
   
 

Values of  tag's value parameter must not contain spaces, AFAIK.
I don't know if it is stated in documentation but my exprience shows
that this is the answer.
 

You're solution is correct but the analysis is a bit off the mark.  It's 
perfectly ok to have spaces in the arg values, but only if they're 
spaces that would be quoted at the command line.

Each arg element defines exactly one argument to the program being 
executed.  Imagine that each arg could be surrounded by quotes if passed 
on the command line.  Hence

   
   
   
is equivalent to typing
   xcopy "my" "certain file"
which is perfectly fine, even though there are spaces in the second 
arg.  It copies the file "my" to the file "certain file".  But if you use

   

then you get
   xcopy "my certain file"
which is an error, since it thinks that the file you want to copy is 
called "my certain file" but you didn't say where to copy it.

Gary
  


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Re: [nant-dev] FW: [Nant-users] How to generate the doc on demand?

[Gary Feldman]

Troy Laurin wrote:
Just a pie-in-the-sky (whatever that means)...
These kind of issues aren't all that uncommon in builds... how 
feasible is a meta-element  that can be nested under any 
element and decorates it with an attribute.  If the  
meta-element supported if/unless and lazy property evaluation, then it 
could be used to do the following:



...

This looks like a good idea, but could be difficult to do generally 
across all tasks.

In the meantime, a simple approach that works today is to duplicate the 
task invocation with if/unless attributes, and use a property to 
indicate which to do:
 In the setup targets:


 In the build targets:
   
   
It's annoyingly verbose, but I use this idiom frequently.
Gary

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[nant-dev] NAnt home page

[Gary Feldman]

The NAnt home page no longer displays correctly, in Firefox on my laptop.
The immediate cause is the new RC3 announcement, which causes the width 
of the main div to grow beyond the width of the screen.  The result is 
that all of the text in the main div appears underneath the navigation bar.

The underlying cause is that the main div is set to float:left, with no 
explicit width.  I believe this falls into a hole in the CSS 
specification, or at least a very tricky part, which allows the browser 
to calculate the width without wrapping.  Firefox does this, concludes 
that the menu and main divs together are too wide for the current 
window, and floats the main div below the menu div. 

I think the fix is to get rid of the float: left for the main div.  It 
doesn't make sense to float the main content.

Gary

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Re: [nant-dev] Redesigned homepage

[Gary Feldman]

Troy Laurin wrote:
On Sun, 20 Mar 2005 09:46:28 -0800, brant <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
 

Is there any reason why we don't just use the existing Wiki as the Default
Home page; and build up the content from that?
   

I'm not so sure this is a good idea.
I think a wiki is an excellent collaboration device for support,
because it can be updated easily and by any concerned party... but I
think these features actually make it a *bad* match for a home page. 
This is where the "official" information regarding the project should
be found.  Of course, you could restrict edits to the "official" pages
to the regular contributors, but then why are you using a wiki?
 

I quite agree.  Wikis also result in navigation structures that shout 
"this was designed by committee, i.e. not at all."  Sometimes they're 
useful, but more often they turn into black holes of time-consuming, 
interesting discussions that don't answer the question.

Wiki sites are supposed to be structure-simple and content-rich.  I
think a project home page needs to be structure-rigid as well as
content-rich.
This doesn't mean that the wiki doesn't have a place, but it doesn't
have to be the main home page to be a useful resource.
 

I think you've hit the nail on the head with both these paragraphs.
Gary

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Re: [Nant-dev] Good example of task unit tests

[Gary Feldman]

Troy Laurin wrote:
Marcin,
I don't have a link to good unit tests right now, but I do have some
suggestions that unit tests should follow...
 

Neither do I, but this happens to be an area in which I'm interested 
(specifically I'm interested both in automating Subversion and in unit 
testing), so I'd be glad to help work on these.

the tests is not found.  This will mark the tests as "not run" instead
of "failed", and so won't cause the build to fail.
 

Personally, I think failed unit tests should never cause the build to 
fail unless they happen to be exploited as a gating mechanism for some 
other part of the build (e.g. an installation or deployment task).  My 
definition of failure for a build is whether or not the explicit targets 
failed to meet their objectives.  A build target fails if it didn't 
create all of the result files, a compile target fails if it couldn't 
create all of the .obj (or similar) files, a unit test target fails if 
it couldn't run the unit tests to produce a unit test result file (but 
not if the unit tests themselves produced failure), a clean target fails 
if anything is left around (but not if it couldn't clean because it was 
already clean), etc.  I only mention this because I don't think NAnt's 
current mechanism for failure is up to this approach, so this may be 
food for thought for a future version.  I'm thinking along the lines of 
explicit, detailed dependencies such as "target a depends upon target b 
completing with any status, target c depends upon target d completing 
successfully, and target e depends upon target f running and failing."  
I think this is post v1.0, but it's an interesting idea.

Gary

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Re: [nant-dev] Redesigned homepage

[Gary Feldman]

Gert Driesen wrote:

You have some very good points there, but I'm not sure that
CruiseControl is a very good example of a website... the left-hand
menu is good from a UI point of view... as you say, the link target
areas are large, and links and elements are all very obvious... but
the menu content is remarkably poor, to the point that as a newcomer
to the website I would have had a nightmare trying to work out the
system if I weren't already familiar with CC.Net, and even knowing the
layout of their website now, I still find it hard to find information
in their site.
   

I can't speak for the entire site, as I haven't really started using 
Cruise Control, but I was able to quickly spot the "Getting Started" 
link.  From there, subsequent navigation is not the home page's 
problem.  Though I will say that a "Getting Started" link, if there is 
one, ought to be the first one under documentation, and their build loop 
and results jsp links are inappropriate for the home page, at least as is. 

I should also add that I think I subconsciously took the idea for a 
separate developer's page from the Python site.  I find their site too 
busy overall, as well, but I do like the large section separators in the 
left hand menu, and the things that I want most often are available 
without scrolling or more than one click. 

Maybe the issue isn't so much limiting the total amount of information, 
but just limiting the topmost level links and biasing the order towards 
newcomers, so that downloads are all under one heading, and come before 
the Contributing section, possibly even before the Documentation section.

I agree that there are loads of items in the menu, but that is only because
I wanted to not only make documentation for the current release, but also
for previous releases and the latest nightly build available online.
 

I certainly agree that making all this information available is a great 
idea, and it's much,  much better than the clumsy navigation on the 
SourceForge site.  I'm just suggesting some simplification at the top 
level - possibly by moving detailed links to a separate site map page 
(not a full site map, just a useful one), or possibly by  making the 
tree structure narrow and deep. 

Gary

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Re: [nant-dev] Redesigned homepage

[Gary Feldman]

>From: "Gert Driesen" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Sent: Tuesday, March 15, 2005 2:37 AM


I'm sorry I didn't get to this sooner, as I come down on the
hate side of hierarchical menus that Troy mentioned, at least
for home pages.

The problem is that hierarchical menus encourage large menus
with many entries.  And that makes things harder to find and
less accessible, not easier.  For comparison, take a look at
the Cruise Control page at 
http://cruisecontrol.sourceforge.net/index.html .  This has 
between 11 and 15 items, depending on which ones are
expanded.  On the other hand the last proposed NAnt
page has, if I counted correctly, about 70 items when 
fully expanded.

The other advantage of the Cruise Control site is that the
selection items are nice, large buttons - which makes it much
easier for people who either have wrist pain for whatever
reason or mice that are acting up.

This doesn't necessarily mean getting rid of the idea of a
hierarchical layout on the home page, but I do think it
needs to be much, much simpler.  My basic design 
philosophy is that home pages need to be targetted to
the people who never or rarely come to the site.
Experienced, frequent visitors will bookmark the 
pages of interest (which effectively allows them to create
a customized hierachical menu) or figure out the fastest 
navigation paths.  

So may I suggest putting yourself in the place of the new
user, and try to optimize the page for that person.  Create
a separate, sub-home page for contributors, and
just have one link to it from the home page.  Remove 
everything else that's only of interest to contributors.  Move
the link to the introduction to be the first thing under
the documentation heading, not buried under User 
Manual.  Combine the Releases and Nightly Build
sections under one heading, called Downloads (because
that's the jargon most commonly used, and hence
the one that people expect to see).  

But besides all that, I think the single best thing that could be
done is to put a direct link to Tasks, Targets, Expressions,
Functions, etc. on each and every page of the online manual
(not the entire web site).  The idea is that whenever you're
looking at a specific task, it should be one click to get to the 
function index, expression page, etc. and vice versa.

Just my two cents, wholesale, for what it's worth.

Gary




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Re: [nant-dev] property overwrite attrib

[Gary Feldman]

>From: "Jamie Briant" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Sent: Wednesday, January 26, 2005 12:49 AM


> The first is dangerous because when a programmer decides to change
some
> build.config's to build.local.config (for example) they are
guaranteed
> at some point to miss one. Not every time. Not even very often. Just
> often enough for the failure to be costly.

I'm not sure how this could happen with an automated replace and a
proper review, and I hope that no one would make this sort of edit
manually.  But you could just as easily have typos elsewhere that are
just as fatal; as I said recently, the  task still isn't
implemented.

>If the word "overwrite" is confusing, may I suggest a new option be
put
> in its place that has the same effect, such as "overwriteexisting",
or
> "lookmeupinthemanual".

If you're going to do that, you may as well make it
"ICouldNotForTheLifeOfMeFigureOutAWayToMakeThisUsableSoIPutInThisUnusa
bleNameInstead" :-)

A while back, I suggested that the "default" pattern occurs often
enough to be put into the property mechanism.  Something like either
  , which would
have the same effect as the other two, or even something like  , again with the same
effect.  This is the wrong time to put this back on the table, but
it's certainly reasonable enough to consider in the future.

Gary




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Re: [nant-dev] Suggestion for call element

[Gary Feldman]

>From: "Castro, Edwin Gabriel (Firing Systems Engr.)" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Sent: Wednesday, November 24, 2004 1:53 PM


>You know, I was just trying to do something similar to this... I was
>writing a bash script to automate compilations of a few projects and
I
...
>couldn't figure out how to mimic functions in make (pass parameters
to
>common code) so I gave up. I never thought of using NAnt (since for
the
>most part I would need to use  to call other builders) but if I
>can mimic functions using targets or something else that would be
great!

It's easily done in make with recursive calls to make, but that's
because make originated on platforms with dirt cheap process forks.
The
other common mechanism is to write your own pattern rules - but the
abstruse nature of pattern rules is part of the reason people are
moving
away from make.

Gary




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Re: [nant-dev] xmlpeek verbosity

[Gary Feldman]

>From: "Gert Driesen" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Sent: Friday, October 29, 2004 6:08 AM

> Wouldn't it just be better (and more powerful) to have separate tasks, or
> functions for this ?

I'm not sure how you would design separate tasks or functions that don't
subsume the current xmlpeek (and for that matter, xmlpoke) behaviors, in
which case xmlpeek becomes unnecessary.  I certainly believe that the basic
mechanism for accessing an xml element should be the more or less the same
regardless of whether or not the element is required, or whether or not it
is allowed to be repeated.

But perhaps you have something in mind that I just haven't considered.

Gary




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Re: [nant-dev] xmlpeek verbosity

[Gary Feldman]

>From: "Gert Driesen" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Sent: Thursday, October 28, 2004 1:53 AM

> But the  task is definitely something different as a user expects
a
> given property to be set to a value.  If we don't output anything at a
all,
> when no matching node is found then that property will not be set and
users
> will have a hard time troubleshooting.  By outputting a warning or error
> message, users are at least notified that something did yield the expected
> result.

This is true, but what can they do about it?  There will surely be cases
where the user doesn't know in advance whether or not the node exists, and
the .xml file is valid either way.  NAnt treats this as a non-fatal error
when failonerror is false, but this still seems wrong - it's not an error as
far as the user is concerned, it's just different data.  While the user
could initialize the property to some value that isn't expected to occur in
the file, and then interrogate the property to decide what to do, that's not
an obvious tactic and it is a bit of hack.

If you don't like the idea of failonerror="false" suppressing the message,
then how about adding an attribute notfound="differentPropName"?  If
provided, and the result isn't found, then this property is set to true and
no message is issued, otherwise it's set to false.  The user who expects
that the peek may feel can then just interrogate this property to decide
what to do.

Gary




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Re: [nant-dev] Output target framework at startup ?

[Gary Feldman]

>From: "Clayton Harbour" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Sent: Thursday, September 16, 2004 10:48 AM


>Hi,
>
>+1 for outputting the target framework
>
>Gary, would the quiet (-q) switch solve the verbosity issue?
>If you are looking for even less output there are other
>commandline tools that also add another quiet switch (really
>quiet) or a "silent" switch to cut down on messages logged.

Sorry it's taken so long to respond to this, but with the holidays,
I let this slip.

Adding a second level of quiet may have potential.  The basic
problem with the current implementation of -q is that it doesn't
provide enough context.  When there's an error from a task,
especially an exec task, it just displays the error output but it
doesn't display any information about where in the build file
the error occurred.  No target name, no task name.  One possible
way to handle this is to have the target log entries cached, and then
emit them if and only if there's an error or warning from a task within that
target.

Another limitation is that the  task doesn't allow me to
specify a different qualify. It's often the case that I have some
utility operations (e.g. a clean) whose output is totally uninteresting
when there's no error.  So I might want my top level nant task to
be at a normal verbosity level, but when I call http://productguide.itmanagersjournal.com/guidepromo.tmpl
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Re: [nant-dev] Output target framework at startup ?

[Gary Feldman]

>From: "Gert Driesen" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Sent: Wednesday, September 15, 2004 2:04 PM


> Hi,
>
> I wonder if we should output the name of the target framework when
starting
> a build, and perhaps also output it again whenever you change the target
> framework
>
> What do you think ?

NAnt's verbosity has been the subject of much discussion (not just me - e.g.
a recent post on the user's list that mentioned postprocessing the NAnt xml
log to make it reasonable).  I think that adding more output unconditionally
must be considered carefully, especially since many people are probably
already printing out such info on their own.

Suppose instead there were a  task, where

would put out some default info, while

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

would do the obvious.  This would give the user much more control over
logging, and furthermore, would solve the problem of recursive nant
invocations producing redundant log info (by simply allowing the user to
omit the  task from the subordinare
nant files).  It would also provide a structure for future enhancement.

Gary




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Re: [nant-dev] Property Scoping

[Gary Feldman]

>From: "Ian MacLean" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Sent: Friday, September 10, 2004 1:12 AM

> If this is still true then I wonder how the parallel task in Ant works
> around it.

Properties in Ant are always read-only, so there shouldn't be any issue
unless two parallel tasks attempt to create the same new property - an
unlikely scenario.

Gary




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Re: [nant-dev] Looping constructs in NAnt

[Gary Feldman]

>From: "Alex Hildyard" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Sent: Monday, September 06, 2004 6:06 PM

>Is it possible to repeat an arbitrary set of tasks with a user-defined exit
condition? If not, could I propose this as a new task?

Might I ask exactly what you're trying to accomplish with this?  That might
help with determining whether there isn't a declarative task itching to come
out.

Gary




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Re: [nant-dev] Re: NAnt

[Gary Feldman]

I've been following this dicussion from the sidelines, and one idea that has
occurred to me that may help, and should probably be addressed anyway, is
having Gump produce its own public/private key pair for signing strong names
for the assemblies.  By using a separate key, you reduce the GAC problem to
just other Gump builds, and if you can somehow guarantee a unique version
number for Gump builds, you're home free.  There is a tradeoff between how
secure you're willing to keep the private key versus how easily a malicious
or negligant user could break things, but that's no worse than the current
situation.

While NAnt doesn't need to go into the GAC, and hence doesn't need a strong
name, other components such as NUnit do, at least for now.  So I think that
sooner or later you're going to have to ask the question as to whether you
want to keep using the project-specific private keys. (I believe NAnt and
NUnit each provide their own, different public/private key files in their
source trees.)

I haven't really thought this through.  I'm just tossing it out as a
possible different direction to investigate.

Gary




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[nant-dev] Re: [Nant-users] Cl.exe /I for additional include directories

[Gary Feldman]

>From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Sent: Tuesday, June 15, 2004 5:09 AM

>note : /LIBPATH for additional library directories should not suffer from
this,
> as it accepts semi-colon delimiter.

This appears to be wrong.  It requires a separate /LIBPATH for each
additional directory.

See
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/vccore/html/_core_.2f.LIBPATH.asp

Funny that I would run into this so soon after this email exchange, but I
have verified that
the latest NAnt nightly (7 July) fails in this case.

Gary



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