Re: Here is my Centipede scepticism

Mats Henricson wrote, On 07/06/2003 1.41:
...>
> Are you saying that now, suddenly, when you've started
> to use Centipede, others in your team are chipping in,
> modifying your build environment?
> 
> What I'm saying is that, everyone must learn the basics
> of ant anyway, since Centipede builds upon ant, and since
> ant is industry standard these days.
> 
> Now your team members also need to learn Centipede, and
> you claim that is an improvement?

Centipede is not to learn. It's an Ant task that uses the Gump 
descriptor. What do you have to learn?

>> Then I started working in open source, other people projects. Their ant
>> scripts were cool, but hard for me to grok.
> 
> Harder than, say, code in general?

Yes. Look at the Cocoon build system. Look at the mails said on it on 
cocoon-dev. You haven't got the problem? Fine, that's cool, but others 
do, and they are evidently not stupid.

>> Ant is great, but having the power of ant w/o having to hand write 
>> ant, is
>> [IMHO] priceless..
> 
> But, that was what I tried to explain in my original
> email, my javadoc ant target needs tweaking anyway.
> And so would most other targets anyway. So, what have
> you gained? Nothing, it seems to me. On the contrary,
> since you've forced your co-workers to use something
> that wasn't necessary.

Forced? You *can* use it, or not use it.

Cents are like Ant tasks, you use them if you need them.

>>     2. It is trying to automate/simplify something
>>         that is always going to have to be customized
>>         by hand.
>>
>> Sounds like an argument against other build tools, not Centipede. 
>> Centibuild
>> is just ant w/ optional imports. You want your hand crafted ant 
>> script, then
>> paste it in. Centipede compliments ant w/ some metadata parsing into
>> properties, w/ optional/re-usable scriptlets, it doesn't stop you from 
>> using
>> plain ant.
> 
> It is NOT just adding something without the cost, since
> it requires your co-workers to learn yet nother tool,
> when ant in most cases is just fine.

In most small projects it's easy to start. But then imagine to have to 
manage 20 projects, each with their own buildfile changes, and have them 
compile every time, with the defined libraries...

Centipede is an Ant task. That can make "antlibs" that contain both 
tasks and prepackaged targets.

If you don't want use target libraries and don't want to have 
autodownload of jars and don't want to have common properties in a 
common descriptor, fine. Then you don't need Centipede.

-- 
Nicola Ken Barozzi                   [email protected]
             - verba volant, scripta manent -
    (discussions get forgotten, just code remains)
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