ANT vs ODE

[Dean Score <sc...@srdi.com>]

Hi I hope this isn't the wrong mail list (point me to the
right place please!) , but I was wondering if there was some 
basic information on ANT's capabilities and drawbacks 
available somewhere.  

I have been asked to look at Ant as a build tool for our build
environment (mostly from the new java/xml crew).  Currently
we have about 25,000 files we build on 5 platforms using
ODE make. The break up is about:

5% C
40% C++
40% java
15% misc stuff like xml,odl,database gen tools, idl files, filters,
parsers, resource files, catalogs, messages, and other code generated
files


It takes about 24 hours to compile on an average platform. 
If ANT supports more dynamic parallelisms and dependencies,
that could help our build times.  We had to sorta squash java 
into our well defined ODE  C++ process.  If the world is 
going java, I would like to look at better more suited solutions.

I've just joined and downloaded ant, so will look over the
docs and try to run it.  Any advice or hints from an (ex)ODE 
person out there would be great. 

Thanks,

Dean

Re: ANT vs ODE

[Stefan Bodewig <bo...@bost.de>]

I don't know ODE at all, so take my comments with a grain of salt.

If you want to replace make with Ant completely, I have to admit, it's
not up for the job yet because it doesn't support other programming
languages than Java very well - there is no builtin support for C/C++
at all so you'd have to encode everything into <uptodate> (Ant 1.2
that is) and <exec> tasks and probably end up with something difficult
to maintain and slow.

I'd recommend using Ant for the Java part of your project though -
usually <javac> is a lot faster than compiling the files separately
and it even works when you encounter circular dependencies - unlike
make.

Stefan