Ant project status report

[Conor MacNeill <co...@cortexebusiness.com.au>]

Status Report for the Ant project

o Ant 1.5.4

Ant 1.5.4 was released on August 12th, 2003

This was a minor maintenance release of the Ant 1.5 branch. 
It addressed just two particular problems - the change to 
the javah entry point in the latest Sun JDK release and the 
Visual Age tasks. The latter, being only compatible with JDK 
1.1, were included to give users of this task a working release 
prior to the Ant 1.6 release which depends on JDK 1.2+

o Ant 1.6 Beta

Two betas of Ant 1.6 have been released to date. Beta 1 was released
on 30th Septamber, 2003 followed by Beta 2 on October 17. Ant 1.6 
has been well received as it provides a number of new features for 
simplifying and reusing build components. A short summary of the new 
features is

* Delayed Task construction, Top levels tasks

* Antlib - a packaging of ant components into a library

* namespace support

* macrodef task for composing ant tasks into larger, reusable tasks

* scriptdef for building tasks from scripting languages

* presetdef for defining tasks based on a specific configuration for
  another ant task

* input management and redirection for exec and java tasks

A bucketload of other fixes and changes as described here 
http://cvs.apache.org/dist/ant/v1.6beta2/

The betas have generated a lot of interesting discussion on the dev list
in particular about the operation of macrodef and namespaces. A third
beta will definitely be produced.

o Legal Issues

None. The PMC has received a request from Peter Donald through Stefan 
Bodewig for the removal of the Myrmidon codebase. The PMC will consider 
and I expect will go ahead and remove this module from CVS.

o PMC meeting

the PMC will shortly hold a virtual meeting to consider a few 
maintenance issues. These include the composition of the PMC, moving
inactive PMC members and committers to emeritus status, etc.

As previously noted, Diane Holt has indicated that she will no longer
be able to act as a PMC member. We thank her for her many contributions
to Ant over the years.

o Community

The dev list has been very active following the 1.6 beta. The discussion 
has been cooperative and healthy. Likewise the user list continues to 
be very active.

Conor

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