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Ant Now A Top Level Apache Project
hardcorejon writes "Am I the only person who didn't notice that on November
18th 2002, the Apache Ant Project had migrated out from under the Jakarta Project umbrella to become a top-level Apache project, joining the ranks of the Apache HTTP Server Project?
Well, for those of us who use Ant on a regular basis, this is great news. Ant is an incredibly powerful tool, increasingly a standard build system for many new projects."
info about ant
-- I was raised on the command line, bitch
This is somewhat off-topic, but reading about Ant remembered me of a question I've been meaning to ask the net for some time now. Since it involves software for building software, this thread may be a good place to do it (and it's only karma, anyway :-)
For a long time I've been wishing that there was an alternative to autoconf. I mean, autoconf is useful, and I still don't know of a better way to build complex stuff on a lot of platforms. But it is painfully slow on small machines, it's hell to make it run on Win32, and it is way too complex, requiring you to write scripts that run through three different interpreters (sh, m4 and make), each with more than their fair share of syntactic weirdness and idiosyncrasies.
(I'm using it for a product we're developing in my company, and I'm the only one who knows how the build system works. It's black magic for everyone else. I do work with very competent programmers, but only I have the patience for making autoconf scripts. Granted, we push it a bit hard: one of our targets is Win32. That part is the worse. Cross-compiling and running from cygwin, with libtool and all that, is tough shit. Every now and then I get so pissed off with it that I start writing plain Makefiles, one for each architecture/OS. Then I reconsider, realize the maintenance hell that would become, and go back to work even blacker magic on the acinclude.m4's... *sigh*)
So, this Ant here I welcomed with high hopes some months ago, and then dumped it just as fast. The thing is: it's Java. It requires you to install a JVM to build a project. Some of our build machines, the most exotic ones, are so small that I would say they're barely able to run the monstruous configure scripts that autoconf creates... So, run a JVM. Right.
Also, when I tried it, Ant was good to build Java stuff, but required some serious hacking to make it build C or C++ (or anything else, for that matter). Since it was targeted to build projects on essentially one platform (Java), it's really hard to make it check for availability of libraries or headers, and to define macros for conditional compilation and stuff. And of course, it didn't have all that "knowledge" autoconf has accumulated over the years, with regard to the subtle peculiarities of each platform. So I found Ant to be nothing more than a fancy make. And I already have make.
So, I'd like to ask: Is Ant any better for non-Java stuff these days? Is someone using it for non-Java projects? And, while I'm at it, does anyone know of a practical alternative for autoconf?
Ant (apparently) was always a top-level project, it just kinda got a little userped by jakarta. Actually the whole jakarta/apache comunity has had quite a change recently.. Many projects have been promoted to top-level, there's new "management" and things appear a lot more organised.
Imho, I think this was over-due as it was getting a little confusing. I hear talk at one point that apache would become another source-forge, but I'm glad to see the (oldest, most well-known, most respected?) OSS project has maintained focus.
Hmm... I think you dropped Ant too quickly. It certainly doesn't require separate build and source directories. I use it for all our projects here (well, OK, so that's 2 official projects and maybe 3-4 'toy' projects I'm personally working on), and in all instances, I have .java and .class files in the same directory. ;-)
You can have a very minimal build.xml that does this, and automates things like JAR builds. For a project where you're already using Java, I wouldn't use anything else. It even plugs into most Java IDEs, if you're the sort who uses those
silly things
It's a strange world -- let's keep it that way
Re 1: uh ok, and src/ to the jar
Re 2: uh ok, add src/ to the runtime classpath
Re 3: uh ok, see Re 1.
Re 0: you can, in fact, put your build and source in the same dir.
Re spellcheck:
Ant is not, as a core distribution, everything and the kitchen sink... it is an, arguably, minimal set of tools required for a meaningful build process. However, ant is completely modular and there are hundreds of articles describing how to add custom tasks to it. It was designed with this clearly in mind. If you have a spellchecker in mind you can build a new task in 20 mins and use it in your next build, or just exec it.
You, sir, make too many assumptions.
Scott
Well, maybe we do try and dictate a bit. We often get bugreps by people complaining ant is rebuilding stuff all the time, which we explain is because you need to put files in a directory structure that matches the package tree, which makes them complain we are control freaks or something. Which forces us to point out the bits in the java spec that says you must lay out your files in this order for javac to import stuff automatically. Similarly, we get sporadic complaints about how we do JAR manifest line wrapping, which are in fact exactly how the language specs demand it, even if one or two duff apps out there cant handle it.
... can take your build file and build a big complex app then run the unit tests against it. And that no-brain-rebuild is a good reason to provide an ant build file, even if you stick to make or worse, an IDE.
But if we werent strict control freaks, who would be?
As for redisting source in your OSS project, yes, that is trivial; everything does it, just multiple s.
You say the benefit of giving everyone the source is that they can modify it. I agree, but also, what if you want the recipients to build it, That is where ant is great; anyone on PC, Mac, Linux, AS/400, Netware,
-steve
(ant developer, co-author of Java Development with Ant,...)