RFC: ant 1.6.3

Wolfgang Baer WBaer@gmx.de
Wed Apr 27 07:32:09 2005


Hi all,

ant 1.6.3 will be released the next days. It includes several fixes and
mostly needed a better jikes integration.

This ant version will be needed to build libjaxen-java, dom4j, 
libxerces2-java, libxalan2-java and maybe several other packages
depending on a DOM 2 implementation without the workaround of including
DOM 2 sources to compile against in the diff.gz file.

However, according to upstream ant 1.6.3 might break some environments !

Therefore the question is:

- Packaging as a new upstream release of libant1.6-java (after sarge is
   released) and fix maybe broken builds with new package upload when
   they show up.
or
- Packaging it as libant1.6.3-java so the two ant versions can coexist

Packaging as libant1.6.3-java could be done pre sarge without breaking
anything existing environements and only used by packages which need
this version to build. Packaging as an upstream release will definitly
need to wait for the sarge release (although can be provided and tested
before in experimental)

Form the changelog (current beta) - the changes which might break older 
build environments:

* The subant task used the canonical version of a file path. This has 
been changed to use the absolute path.
* Tar now writes two EOF blocks rather than one.
* The Reference object now has a project field which it uses in 
preference to the project passed in. This allows composite references to 
be handled to nested projects.
* <junit> with filtertrace="true" will now also swallow lines for the 
sun.reflect package. If you need to see them in your stack trace, you 
must set filtertrace to false.
* The jikes compiler adapter now supports -bootclasspath, -extdirs and 
-sourcepath and also uses the same logic for debug flags as javac. This 
means, the jikes compiler adapter now requires Jikes 1.15 or later.

For the other changes see: http://cvs.apache.org/dist/ant/v1.6.3beta1/

Wolfgang