Ant status report (for board)

[Conor MacNeill <co...@cortexebusiness.com.au>]

Status Report for the Ant project

o Ant 1.5.2

Ant 1.5.2 was released on March 3, 2003

The zip refactoring that was undertaken to eliminate a number of zip/jar 
update bugs introduced a regression whereby some elements of the produced 
Zips could not be viewed by WinZIP. This required a followup 1.5.3 release.

o Ant 1.5.3

Ant 1.5.3 was released on April 9, 2003.

Ant 1.5.3 addresses over 100 bug reports from Ant 1.5.1. It has proved to be a 
stable release so far. As I stated previously there is not expected to be any 
further Ant 1.5.x releases. 

o Ant 1.6

Ant 1.6 is the current development codebase (CVS head). No release plan has
been considered for this release. Previously I had expected this to be 
released around June but now I think this is more likely to be later in the 
year, say August 2003.

Features which are candidates for this release remain:

* Some form of task library support, allowing third-party tasks to be
more easily packaged, distributed and integrated with Ant.

* Support for polymorphic types

* Delayed Task construction, Top levels tasks, etc

Much development work and significant change in the Ant core has already been 
committed (namespace support, top-level tasks, plugin capability for property 
resolution, component creation, etc)

o JDK 1.1 support

The Ant project has voted to drop the requirement for JDK 1.1 support in the 
Ant core from 1.6 onwards. This change has been canvassed in the user 
community and strongly signalled in the Ant 1.5.3 release notes and download 
pages. The change was strongly supported. It will eliminate the need for 
messy reflection-based workarounds that had been necessary previously.

o ant.apache.org site

Since the previous report, the Ant site is now live and the former site under 
Jakarta redirected. 

o Bylaws

The current bylaws proposal,
http://cvs.apache.org/viewcvs.cgi/*checkout*/ant/proposal/ant-site/
is being voted upon by the PMC now. If accepted, the board will be asked to 
approve the bylaws. We'd be happy to work towards a single Apache-wide 
project bylaws proposal, if required.

o Legal Issues

A request has been received from Peter Donald for the assignment of copyright 
in the Myrmidon codebase. The PMC has voiced no objections to the assignment 
in principle but I have requested clarification of which code is affected. No 
response has been received to date.

o Outstanding bugs and patches

The number of outstanding bugs against Ant has stabilised over the last three 
months. i.e. the arrival rate generally equals the cleanup rate. There 
remains, however, a large bug backlog. Two committers have been added to the 
Ant project which may help in this area.

o New committers

Two new commiters have been added, Jesse Stockall and Antoine Levy-Lambert. 
They have shown a long-standing commitment to addressing issues in Ant. Also 
they willhelp us cover more of the optional Ant tasks.

o Community

The dev list has been very active discussing the requirements and 
implementation of antlibs, the consequences for dynamic typing and 
polymorphism in Ant. The disccusion has addressed issues such as XML 
namespace usage and its relation to antlibs, etc. I think some consensus is 
emerging. 

While active, the discussion has not been heated and the community appears 
healthy. Likewise the user list is very active and healthy.

Conor

Re: Ant status report (for board)

[Stefan Bodewig <bo...@apache.org>]

+1 to the report as a whole.

On Wed, 21 May 2003, Conor MacNeill <co...@cortexebusiness.com.au>
wrote:

> While active, the discussion has not been heated and the community
> appears healthy.

The most important piece to me.

Stefan