Re: Ant 2.0 vision was Re: PATCH: Attributes of Target can reference properties

[Peter Donald <do...@apache.org>]

On Wed,  4 Jul 2001 12:33, Ken Wood wrote:
> Ant has made my life SO much better and easier. And I have (had?) high
> hopes for Ant 2.0 bringing more value. But, it's beginning to look like
> there will be an Ant 2.0 discussion in the year 2101 while Ant 1.9999999
> is being released....

which is why there are currently forks in progress with possibility of new 
forks in future.

> Whether he was 'right' or 'wrong', Duncan was the visionary at the
> beginning. I can recall when I first looked at Ant that I thought it was
> totally
> inadequate. I came back to it months later, and found it had improved.
> My
> recollection is that the hard work of the committers responding to
> suggestions
> made it powerful enough to be practical. This was during a period of
> 'refinement'
> to Ant as it was then envisioned. Those people certainly deserve a great
> deal of thanks and credit. But, now that we are debating major issues of
> a
> redesign, rather than incremental touch up of an existing design,
> the loss of a 'visionary' to lead is being felt. Specifically,
> with the loss of that single vision we are left with a set of competing
> visions that show no sign of converging to a single vision we can all
> agree to support.
>
> Until we get back to a single vision that we can all agree on,
> these discussions will go on and on, and Ant will
> fall further behind where it could be. And it doesn't seem to me
> that these discussions are bringing us closer to a single vision...

Well I can't speak for the rest of ant-dev but I generally agree for 
JDDs original vision with one exception (I believe properties should allowed 
to be non-strings). The only people I know of who fundamentally disagree with 
JDDs original design are not committers ...

>
> -ken
>
> P.S. My personal observations is that much of the debate seems to come
> down to personal choices about how to use Ant. From my perspective,
> all these differing, conflicting points of view are valid. Since Ant is
> extensible,
> and the source code would be available, can't we wrap this up and agree
> to
> a core set of functionality that we can all live with? Then people who
> want
> to do it THIS way or people who want to do it THAT way can customize it
> in their shop. Especially if Ant 2.0 makes it easier to customize via
> plug-ins...

It will be able to do that however many people believe that ONLY their 
opinion is valid and want the rest of us to take up their flag.

Cheers,

Pete

*-----------------------------------------------------*
| "Faced with the choice between changing one's mind, |
| and proving that there is no need to do so - almost |
| everyone gets busy on the proof."                   |
|              - John Kenneth Galbraith               |
*-----------------------------------------------------*