[Biojava-l] New cross-platform build system for BioJava

[Thomas Down]

On Thu, Apr 13, 2000 at 02:00:01AM +0100, Mr. A.R.N. Tivey wrote:
> 
> I was wondering if you've looked at Ant, produced as part of the Apache
> Jakarta project (http://jakarta.apache.org/ant/ ). It sounds like it was
> developed for almost identical reasons. It's already being used as the
> build tool for Sun's reference servlet/JSP engine.
> 
> If you have evaluated and rejected it, it would be useful to know why. I
> was thinking of using it for a small project I've just started but may
> reconsider :-)

I'm following the Jakarta project, and I've been quite interested
in ANT.  I haven't used it in anger myself, but I can't see any
reason not to use it for your own projects.  The rationale behind
Biojava having it's own tools is that we've been trying to
minimize external dependancies (xml.jar is already pretty-much
unavoidable), and I got a rather negative reaction when I suggested
importing ANT into the biojava tree.  I'd still like to see ANT
buildscripts for biojava, but until ANT is widely deployed, some
kind of custom build tool is probably here to stay.

I'd be interested to know how you get on if you do decide to
adopt ANT.

Thanks,

Thomas
-- 
There are whose study is of smells
And to attentive schools rehearse
How something mixed with something else
Makes something worse.