Ant Questions

[Patrick Beard <be...@netscape.com>]

At 11:53 AM -0400 7/29/2000, rubys@us.ibm.com wrote:
>That's exactly what Ant does for you...it looks at the source files and
>only passes the ones to javac which are more recent than their
>corresponding class files.  Try it!

Ah, that works only if you have:  1 class per source file, and the 
location of source files in the source tree is the same as class 
files in the class tree. I was using a more shotgun approach to 
building, with multiple source files in a common directory, in 
potentially different packages, letting the javac compiler sort 
things out. Has anybody started working on an IDE or at least a tool 
that generates ant build files? Seems like a good idea.

I've written a tool that lets you glue together multiple disjoint 
directory hierarchies, and jar files (it's called jlink). I want to 
integrate jlink into ant potentially. The one thing I'm trying to 
understand is how to hook together dependencies. If the inputs to 
jlink are a directory and a text file, how can I communicate those 
dependencies so that ant won't rebuild the final target?

- Patrick
-- 

// Patrick C. Beard
// Java Runtime Enthusiast -- "Will invoke interfaces for food."
// mailto:beard@netscape.com

Re: Ant Questions

[James Duncan Davidson <du...@x180.com>]

on 7/30/00 11:33 AM, Patrick Beard at beard@netscape.com wrote:

> potentially different packages, letting the javac compiler sort
> things out. Has anybody started working on an IDE or at least a tool
> that generates ant build files? Seems like a good idea.

A tool that built ant files, displayed them in a tree, let particular
targets be build with a highlight and a click would be really cool. Theres
one that somebody started that's GPL. I was hoping that it could be
mainstreamed into the codebase, but it can't with that license. :(

> I've written a tool that lets you glue together multiple disjoint
> directory hierarchies, and jar files (it's called jlink). I want to
> integrate jlink into ant potentially. The one thing I'm trying to
> understand is how to hook together dependencies. If the inputs to
> jlink are a directory and a text file, how can I communicate those
> dependencies so that ant won't rebuild the final target?

Ant will call each task in the targets that get called -- it's the tasks
themselves that have to decide whether or not to take action and not
rebuild.

.duncan