Off topic question?

[Steve Cohen <St...@ignitesports.com>]

Here's an annoyance of working with ant on Windows 2000.  It's not ant's
fault but I wonder if anyone has a workaround:

Typically an ant project will have a "dist" directory into which the
distribution is put.  It will also have a "clean" task which will
typically have something like 

<delete dir="dist"/>

If you look at this directory with Explorer, 
and then go do another build with "clean", the dist directory will be
wiped out and Win2K will conveniently destroy the explorer window that
was showing it.  If you want to look at it again, you have to get a new
explorer window with however much drilling-down is necessary.  A pain.

Now, I know I could get around this by defining clean to be
<delete>
	<fileset dir = "dist">
</delete>

But I'd rather not do that if possible.  I'd rather find a way to tell
Win2K not to destroy explorer windows for non-existent directories.  I'm
willing to take the hit of an error message if I attempt to access it
before ant can recreate it.

Does anyone know how to do this?

Re: Off topic question?

["Frank E. Weiss" <fr...@well.com>]

I doubt you can do this in W2K. Basically, if you delete the object (folder)
then the explorer viewer is also closed. I don't see why you have to have
that window open. I usually keep explorer open on the desktop. Or you can
keep explorer open one level above the dist folder.

BTW, an easy way to reproduce the problem is the type "start dist" in the
same command shell you run ant in.

Steve Cohen wrote:

> Here's an annoyance of working with ant on Windows 2000.  It's not ant's
> fault but I wonder if anyone has a workaround:
>
> Typically an ant project will have a "dist" directory into which the
> distribution is put.  It will also have a "clean" task which will
> typically have something like
>
> <delete dir="dist"/>
>
> If you look at this directory with Explorer,
> and then go do another build with "clean", the dist directory will be
> wiped out and Win2K will conveniently destroy the explorer window that
> was showing it.  If you want to look at it again, you have to get a new
> explorer window with however much drilling-down is necessary.  A pain.
>
> Now, I know I could get around this by defining clean to be
> <delete>
>         <fileset dir = "dist">
> </delete>
>
> But I'd rather not do that if possible.  I'd rather find a way to tell
> Win2K not to destroy explorer windows for non-existent directories.  I'm
> willing to take the hit of an error message if I attempt to access it
> before ant can recreate it.
>
> Does anyone know how to do this?


--
To unsubscribe, e-mail:   <ma...@jakarta.apache.org>
For additional commands, e-mail: <ma...@jakarta.apache.org>