Looking for information on Ant

[Alan Santos <as...@odi.com>]

Hello,
 I have just subscribed to this list yesterday, looking for information
specifically about Ant and I've seen a bit of traffic about it, so I don't
think I'm completely out of place here :)

I've got three immediate questions:

1. Is there a better list for Ant
2. I looked, but couldn't find any documentation on Ant. Can someone give me
a pointer to any?
3. Does ant require cvs as part of it's build process?

A positive answer to Q3 means I don't need answers to Q1 or Q2 :)

thanks,
alan

p.s. As reference to the -depend questions,
the depend functionality is available in jdk1.2, but should be passed
as -Xdepend

Re: Looking for information on Ant

["Craig R. McClanahan" <cm...@mytownnet.com>]

Alan Santos wrote:

> Hello,
>  I have just subscribed to this list yesterday, looking for information
> specifically about Ant and I've seen a bit of traffic about it, so I don't
> think I'm completely out of place here :)
>
> I've got three immediate questions:
>
> 1. Is there a better list for Ant

Not really -- there's been talk of setting up a mail list for the
"jakarta-tools" project separately, but it has not happened yet.

>
> 2. I looked, but couldn't find any documentation on Ant. Can someone give me
> a pointer to any?

As with most Jakarta stuff right now, "the code is the documentation" -- and
that is not really saying much.  I learned most of what I know about Ant by
becoming familiar with the basic concepts of a Makefile (the idea that you can
make named targets, and the named targets can depend on each other), and then
studying the "build.xml" files used to create some existing applications (such
as Tomcat).

>
> 3. Does ant require cvs as part of it's build process?
>

You do not need CVS to build Ant, or to use it (although Ant has recently been
extended with the capability to check source code out of a CVS archive if you
want to).

What I would suggest is to grab a recent CVS snapshot of the "jakarta-tools"
project from the Jakarta web site, and then unpack it in a suitable directory
on your computer.  The file "ant/src/bin/ant" (or "ant/src/bin/ant.bat" for
Windows) is a script that executes Ant from the command line.  As you can see
from the script, you will need the "ant.jar" and "xml.jar" files -- the latter
can be created by making a copy of the "projectx-tr2.jar" file in the top level
directory.

>
> A positive answer to Q3 means I don't need answers to Q1 or Q2 :)
>
> thanks,
> alan
>

Craig McClanahan