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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
Some alternatives to ant/make are
There's also something called Cons, but it needs perl to work. See this.
I haven't found a good alternative to autoconf yet. There used to be Metaconfig, but I don't know who maintains it any more (or where). It produces configure scripts similar to what you see when you configure perl. This guy uses some unreleased software package for his build systems that tend to work really well -- for C code under Unix.
Come to think of it, if someone ports/writes a build tool in C#, you'd be set.
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,...)