optional tasks without disturbing the ant/lib folder

[Mark Lybarger <ml...@gmail.com>]

i'm interested in using some of the ant optional tasks without distrubing 
the ant-lib folder. basically, i want to provide all the needed jars as part 
of my tools area, and not have each machine that runs the bulid have to 
update it's ant/lib folder. the current task i'm after is the scp task. but 
there's likely to be many others.

from what i read, there's no clean way to do this. you can update the system 
classpath, add libs to your ~/.ant/lib folder, use the -lib switch to ant, 
or remove the ant-<optional ant task def>.jar from the ant lib folder and 
provide it with the needed optional jar. all of these require some external 
modification on every machine that is going to run the ant script. 

what would be really nice is if there were two "namespaces" available for a 
given optional task. such that the task in the ant/lib/ant-jsch.jar would 
have:

<taskdef name="scp" classname="
org.apache.tools.ant.taskdefs.optional.ssh.Scp">

and perhaps an ant/external/lib/ant-jsch.jar would have:

<taskdef name="e_scp" classname="
external.org.apache.tools.ant.taskdefs.optional.ssh.Scp">

thoughts/ideas?

it seems similar to xerces/xalan in the 1.4.2 jdk which sun seems to have 
resolved with jdk 1.5.