Ant versions to target, gump saga, etc (was Re: Ant-contrib-developers Digest, Vol 15, Issue 8)

On Jul 31, 2007, at 11:50 AM, Matthew Inger wrote:

> Curt,
>
> I can take a look and see if I can get the antlib stuff working  
> with cpptasks.  It should be
> relatively easy, as we have it working for for regular antcontrib  
> as well.
>

Thanks.  All the stuff appears to be in place, it just doesn't seem  
to work, at least as I expect it should.  I'd need to fire up Ant in  
a debugger to try out either what I misunderstood or what is broken.   
I'd get to it eventually, but if it was obvious to someone else or  
they were already set up to diagnose it, it would allow me to work on  
other things in cpptasks.


> I've been working on some changes to ant-contrib anyway to break it  
> out by ant version,
> as the differences in ant versions are now become very vast.   
> Things such as resources
> which were added in 1.7, macros in 1.6, and so forth, basically  
> leave two choices
> with ant-contrib:
>
> a)  support one version of ant
> b)  build seperate libraries for each ant version.
>

That is an ugly choice.  On general principle and without looking at  
the issues, I think it would be best to develop only one version  
targeting Ant trunk but make reasonable efforts to stay compatible  
with the later 1.6.x's and forget earlier versions .  Are certain  
tasks more affected by the changes?  For example, if the logic tasks  
worked across versions and, but other tasks were more affected by the  
changes, would it make sense to split ant-contrib.jar into multiple  
subprojects?

I've been thrashing on trying to get ant-contrib/trunk building on  
Gump.  Hopefully, fifteenth time is the charm.  Now I'm back to using  
build.xml with an -Dno-ivy option.  We will see if that keeps Gump  
happy.

I copied over some of the Maven related stuff from cpptasks.  I'm not  
committed to Maven-ifying ant-contrib, but it seems pretty desirable  
for cpptasks.  The potentially disruptive things for ant-contrib were  
moving src/java to src/main/java and moving the resource files on src/ 
java/net/sf/antcontrib to src/main/resources/net/sf/antcontrib.  I've  
adjusted the build.xml for the new locations.  All the other things  
were new files that could be removed if it doesn't work out.

What is the backstory on the ant-contrib/trunk/docs directory?  Are  
they hand-written HTML documentation for the tasks, or were they  
generated by some tool and then checked in.  cpptasks had been using  
code from Ant's proposal/xdocs directory, but that made things pretty  
ungainly to maintain and build.  I replaced that for cpptasks a  
quickly written Javadoc doclet and an accompanying XSLT transform  
that generated an Xdoc file that Maven then renders into HTML.  You  
could tweak the XSLT transform if you wanted to convert directly to  
HTML.


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