The
truth be told, I haven't touched Inst.Ant for the past few days (not that
I get more than an hour when I do). It was almost feeling like a second
job how hard I was wanting to push it out as soon as possible. So given
that and some technical issues with making a real quality piece of code out
o Inst.Ant I think I am going to lay the project aside for a while. Who
knows how long I will leave it there, but IMHO it seems that the technical
reasons are enough... - Immutable Properties
- This
one has been bothering me the most of all of them. There are several ways
that I can get around it, but none of them feel quite right. Each feels
like I am shaving a different corner of the peg called Installer Framework
or mis-shaping the hole that a set of tasks on top of Ant should fit into.
I've seen some mention of somethnig called "dynamic proeprties" in the "embed"
proposal in the Ant cvs tree and maybe ehtat is what is neede, but I haven't
looked into it.
- Lack of Transactions
- I've
seen Steve Loughran mention that a time or two, even recently on the Ant
mailing lists. This really is a biggie... what if the first most base component
you are installing fails, or a middle component? Do you quit with half an
install? Do you continue? Do you roll-back? All three of those should
be available to the install writer (in increasing order of preference).
But there is no way to really group the dependencies together as an atomic
transaction which at some level is essential for a good install. True, you
could add <try> and <catch> fron Ant-Contrib,
but then it ceases to be a declerative build script and becomes a programming
language. Go write a custom progam at that point.
Maybe some time away may give me time too look at it from a different
perspactive too... Maybe even I am approaching this wrong and I sohuld be
writing a Java app that wraps ant and uses it as the work engine when it
is assigned. Maybe some time will help me find the right peg, or the right
hole may show up, or I may realize that the peg I am holding is sideways.
Maybe I'll continue to enjoy Neverwinter Nights as well... |
