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Re: [platform-ant-dev] Ant project builders in separate VM?
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Jared Burns wrote:
I appreciate the position you're in, Bob. But I think you need to recognize
that the vast majority of the world doesn't use Ant to drive Eclipse.
The majority of people we've heard from are using Ant in heterogenous
environments. The same Ant scripts have to run from within Eclipse and from
the command line.
Ok, I hear and agree, but we're not quite communicating.
Let's turn it around. You have a really nice feature that makes it
simple for people to use plugin tasks as though they were preinstalled
in Ant. Whatever you intended it for, that's what it is. You're
essentially saying that people don't want to use it because it ties them
to Eclipse. So you throw them back to manually juggling the Ant launch
classpath and adding taskdef elements to all their scripts.
How about thinking of this in terms of making it easier for people to
produce scripts that run both inside and outside Eclipse _and_ take
advantage of plugin tasks?
These Eclipse-specific Ant tasks are cool and all, but they're an advanced,
fairly niche feature. I'm inclined to say that if your users are advanced
enough to be writing Ant scripts that use these tasks, they should be able to
set the option to run those scripts in the same VM as Eclipse.
I think it's wrong to assume that everyone who runs Ant is a shell
script bangin' Ant expert. Far from it. Many people learn Ant by
imitating simple examples, cutting and pasting generated code and
running these examples from Eclipse in the usual edit,test,loop cycle,
just like applications in any other language. This is the kind of thing
an IDE should try to make easy.
Ok, over my word limit.
Bob
I think the fact that Ant used to be run in the same VM as Eclipse was way
more counterintuitive than what we have today. I don't remember the feature's
history, but I'd *guess* that the only reason we even support it is so that
the Eclipse build process can be run with Ant and use the Eclipse JDT
compiler.
- Jared
On Friday 05 March 2004 08:26 pm, Bob Foster wrote:
Shackelford, John-Mason wrote:
And furthermore, though an active member of the ant community, I am *not*
on a first-name basis with anyone that has constructed a build system
tied to an IDE. :)
If this is the party line, I'm starting to wonder why there is a "plugin
can add tasks to Ant" feature at all. (And feeling just a bit stupid for
having written one.)
I can imagine all the great fun I can have explaining to users why they
"installed your plugin and it doesn't work." I really don't get enough
of that from the way Eclipse remembers past editor choices. ;-}
But I'm trying to reconcile 1) the plugin works just fine in 2.1 and 3.0
by default with 2) the decision was made a long time ago that it
wouldn't. Is that just one of those 3.0 incompatibility shoes that
hasn't dropped yet?
Bob
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