Re: ANT and CVS [digression]

[Eric Siegerman]

On Fri, Aug 03, 2001 at 11:06:12AM -0400, David Fuller wrote:
> Maybe I'm looking at the wrong Apache Ant, but it looks like a build
> tool?  I'm not sure I understand how you would use this to process your
> CVS commands...

One of the things the Ant folks dislike about Make is that it's
shelling out all the time to do the real work.  They instead
write Java classes to do the things you'd normally invoke
external commands for -- compiling, jarring, CVSing, etc.

They have a point -- shelling out is non-portable.  Makefiles are
not exactly write-once-run-anywhere.  But the alternative seems
to be to turn your build system into an O/S ... They should have
just written a build system in Emacs -- it's already most of the
way there :-/

Now, whether it makes sense to be doing CVS stuff from the build
system in the first place is another question.  Probably not.
I've gone into the details here recently, so I won't belabour it
again.

--

|  | /\
|-_|/  >   Eric Siegerman, Toronto, Ont.        address@hidden
|  |  /
With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However, this is not
necessarily a good idea.
        - RFC 1925 (quoting an unnamed source)