Re: [SUBMIT] Cat Task

[Derek Slager <de...@activate.net>]

On Thu, Mar 07, 2002 at 06:03:01PM +0100, Stefan Bodewig wrote:
> some comments:
> 
> (1) any problems with calling the task concat instead of cat?
> Non-Unix people will probably not recognize "cat".

It's not a problem for me -- changed.

> (2) Instead of tofile, I'd prefer destfile as an attribute name.

Not a problem -- changed. I did wonder about this one when initially putting
the task together -- the task design guidelines suggested 'destdir' as a
preferred name but made no mention of 'destfile'. I ended up choosing
'tofile', to be consistent with the Copy task.

> (3) You may consider using nested FileLists instead of/in addition to
> FileSets - the order by which DirctoryScanner returns the files is not
> determined while people using cat will probably need a specific order.

Yes, good idea. I didn't know what FileLists were until you mentioned them
(the documentation is a bit buried), but it seems quite reasonable to
include support for them. I believe that it's important to keep the FileSet
option as well, so they're both in there for now.

> (4) I'm not sure, but maybe an encoding attribute is needed.  We have
> gradually added encoding attributes to almost all tasks that read and
> modify files.

Yes, though it would only be used when dumping text to the console (the task
treats all file inputs as binary if the destination is a file). Of course,
we'd have to assume that all of the files being concatenated together have
the same encoding -- but I doubt that will ever become a serious issue. I've
added the support in any case.

Thank you for your comments. I apologize for the tardiness of my response --
things have been quite busy for me lately. The updated files are attached to
this message, contained within a GNU gzipped tarball.

 docs/manual/optionaltasklist.html.diff
 docs/manual/OptionalTasks/concat.html
 src/etc/testcases/taskdefs/optional/concat.xml
 src/main/org/apache/tools/ant/taskdefs/defaults.properties.diff
 src/main/org/apache/tools/ant/taskdefs/optional/Concat.java
 src/testcases/org/apache/tools/ant/taskdefs/optional/ConcatTest.java

Thanks again,

-- 
Derek Slager
Software Engineer
Activate
derek@activate.net

Re: [SUBMIT] Cat Task

[Stefan Bodewig <bo...@apache.org>]

On 02 Apr 2002, Stefan Bodewig <bo...@apache.org> wrote:

> Some notes:

some more

* addText() gets called for test1 on my machine - this is why I've added
sanitizeText().

* tearDown() would only delete the first file.

Stefan

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Re: [SUBMIT] Cat Task

[Stefan Bodewig <bo...@apache.org>]

Thanks Derek,

I'm going to commit the task - and make it a core task at the same
time.

Some notes:

* the task doesn't honor the user specified encoding if it is writing
to a file instead of Ant's logging system.

* shouldn't this snippet

        // If using filesets, disallow inline text. This is similar to
        // using GNU 'cat' with file arguments -- stdin is simply
        // ignored.
        if (fileSets.size() > 0) {
            throw new BuildException("Cannot include inline text " + 
                                     "when using filesets.");
        }

better be in execute than in addText?  The way it is right now, concat
will concatenate all files and fail after that, maybe even creating
the output file.

* we'll need to revisit the cleanup code at the end of execute().
Some similar code in the zip task family is know to cause problems in
some situations.

* Many thanks for providing a testcase!!

Cheers

        Stefan

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