Re: [Gnu-arch-users] make vs ?

[Zenaan Harkness]

On Wed, 2004-10-06 at 18:31, Dustin Sallings wrote:
> On Oct 5, 2004, at 23:15, Zenaan Harkness wrote:
> 
> > I've looked (barely) at ant (Java), however the XML config/ script 
> > seems
> > to be a little, ... verbose. If someone can compare make with ant, that
> > would be useful.
> 
>       ant is verbose for some things, but saves a tremendous amount of 
> typing for others.  It's not so much the syntax that makes ant good, 
> it's the tasks that are built-in that help you with the exact things 
> you want want to do.  The javac task, for example, knows how to look 
> for code and build it into another directory.  The jar task knows how 
> to assemble things from different parts of your tree into a jar 
> (including filename mapping so you can have some stuff included from 
> your source tree and some from your build tree, but have them look the 
> same).
> 
>       It's definitely worth spending a bit of time with if you have a lot of 
> java projects.  Certain things in make are a bit easier the first time 
> (i.e. making a new transformation rule for something fairly simple), 
> but if you do end up having to write a task for something (not very 
> common), there is quite a bit you can do, and quite a bit it'll do for 
> you.
> 
>       I wouldn't expect to be able to convince you, though.  I thought the 
> pain of having to write build scripts in xml would be unbearable until 
> I actually gave it a go.  It's almost worth it just for the classpath 
> handling.  At least check out the manual 
> (http://ant.apache.org/manual/index.html) and check out the tasks that 
> are available out of the box.  Adding new collections of tasks is 
> typically as easy as adding a jar to your classpath and pulling in all 
> of the stuff it has to offer as a single line.  But again, besides my 
> own weird custom code generators, I've only had to do this once (and I 
> think it was last week).  :)

Thanks - that's useful information.

I have a pretty clear setup at the moment - including things like
out-of-tree building, including some src/ as well as build/ files,
and I like to have a close control over these aspects. My suspicion
is that "packages" that do this stuff for me will either "encourage"
me to use particular layouts/ solution, and/ or require me to
learn more just to get what I want out of it. Of course, the same
might be the case with make...

ta
zen