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Posted to dev@ant.apache.org by Bill Burton <bi...@progress.com> on 2002/08/21 19:19:59 UTC

Arbitrary formatting changes to -projecthelp output?

Hello,

I'm working with some folks to implement menu based completion for Ant's
command line using the amazing Z-Shell (http://www.zsh.org).  In order to
provide completion on targets, ant -projecthelp is executed and the list
of target and default target parsed from the output.

I've run into an issue where the output format for the default target has
changed between 1.4.1 and 1.5.  In 1.4.1, the default target was output at
the top right after the build file name.  Now in 1.5, it's at the end of
the output and the target name is on the same line as the Default target
label.  

Version 1.4.1 output:
---------------------
Buildfile: build.xml

Default target:

 main          --> creates a minimum distribution in ./dist

Main targets:

 main          --> creates a minimum distribution in ./dist
 ...
--------------------

Version 1.5 output:
--------------------
Buildfile: build.xml

Main targets:

 main          --> creates a minimum distribution in ./dist
 ...

Default target: main
--------------------

It looks like the changes were made to Main.java at 1.46:
http://cvs.apache.org/viewcvs/jakarta-ant/src/main/org/apache/tools/ant/Main.java.diff?r1=1.45&r2=1.46&only_with_tag=MAIN

Would be feasable to change the formatting back the way it was in 1.4.1
for the 1.5.1 release?  Or, could the Default target label be moved up to
after the Buildfile label?

In any case, I would suggest that arbitrary formatting changes to
-projecthelp output should not be made as long as Ant is at the 1.x
release level.  If the indication for a the default target were to change,
a better format would be to append "(Default)" after the description text
of the default target.

Thanks,
-Bill

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