Angry with Ant

[Balmed Beach <ba...@yahoo.com>]

Ant is letting me do some things, but has really
closed the door on file lists, wild card lists, and
list manipulation/transformation that was dirt simple
in other  build tools.

Why is there a <project/> that everything must be in?
Seems like a waste of one nesting level to me.

What does putting the format into XML buy you except
forcing one to always use quotes and an ugly as hell
file to be maintained by humans?

How about taking a list of properties from a file that
represent package names. Then create a single file set
from that list of package names that includes all
*.java from each package, non-recursively? Don't want
to change anything in the build file if packages are
added or removed.

It needs lots of inline expansion support:

- nested property expansion
- string manipulation (ucase, lcase, trim, substr,...)
- dirname, basename (yes, I know about that task, need
  inline support for this)
- fileset that can work on "lists"
- back-and-forth from lists to path-style; in other
  words space seperated conversions to : or ;
  a nice generic regex substitute and replace would
  be nice

I just can't believe this stuff is not there. Some of
it may be done through a task, but some of it is not
applicable to a task at all. The only solution being
write your own task for just about everything. Yuck.

I also can't believe the rejections to enhancement
requests for GNU-Make style list functions. This is
not the "make way"; it something that so many of us
need. Is Ant really ANTI-MAKE zealots?

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RE: Angry with Ant

[Ilja Preuss <pr...@disy.net>]

Just one recommendation: Instead of stating "ant sucks", it might be
more productive to ask questions like "I need to do X - what would be
the best way to do this with Ant?"

Regards, Ilja


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