Build tool decision **

[Vijay Raghavan <vi...@netscape.com>]

My group is in the process of making a build tool decision: ANT vs GMAKE

So here is the question:
Does ANT have any known stability issues? Is there a problem with, say,
compiling thousands of Java files at a time.

Can someone give me a feel for the size of projects ANT has been tried
with?

Thanks
Vijay

Re: Build tool decision **

["Daniel L. Rall" <dl...@collab.net>]

Vijay Raghavan wrote:
> 
> My group is in the process of making a build tool decision: ANT vs GMAKE
> 
> So here is the question:
> Does ANT have any known stability issues? Is there a problem with, say,
> compiling thousands of Java files at a time.
> 
> Can someone give me a feel for the size of projects ANT has been tried
> with?

Hi Vijay!
At JavaOne in SF this year, I attended a talk by Martin Fowler (author
of "Refactoring", "UML Distilled", etc.).  Someone in the audience asked
for his method of build automation.  Turns out his company is using Ant
for a Java-based desktop application which takes like hours to build (or
something ridiculous like that).  He urged the entire audience to try
out Ant as their next generation build tool.  Other projects which I am
familiar with that use Ant as their primary build tool include Ant
itself, Tomcat (Apache and Sun reference implementation of a servlet
container for the 2.2 Servlet API), Turbine, and WebMacro.  I first
started using it to build Tomcat version 3 from CVS.  I've never once
had problems as a "end-user", and I've always been using an Ant CVS
snapshot.
-- 

Daniel Rall <dl...@finemaltcoding.com>

Re: Build tool decision **

[do...@mad.scientist.com]

On Thu, 20 Jul 2000, Vijay Raghavan wrote:
> So here is the question:
> Does ANT have any known stability issues? Is there a problem with, say,
> compiling thousands of Java files at a time.

Well some of my builds go for about 6 hours and include
close to 100 targets. This is running on with 128 MB memory. Most
of these targets aren't javac stype targets thou (mainly
java targets).

> Can someone give me a feel for the size of projects ANT has been tried
> with?


The largest build of java files I have seen is about 1200
.java files and this works fine on linux with jikes. I heard
it brakes on win32 thou. I believe comments have been in
list archive. Basically it broke sending more than 400
parameters to commandline program. This can be fixed but is
yet to be (unless done it latest exec work).


Cheers,

Pete

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