Ant dependencies

[Al Sutton]

I've just checked GXP out into eclipse and there are a number of
imports from ant (things like BuildException, DirectoryScanner,
FileScanner).

Is there a reason for not including the appropriate jar in the
repository?

Al.

[Laurence Gonsalves]

I believe those classes are part of ant itself, so if you're going to
be building with ant then you should already have those classes as
part of your ant installation. You may need to update your build
classpath to include ant.jar from your ant installation.

If you're not going to be using ant, then you might want to tell
Eclipse to ignore the com.google.gxp.compiler.ant package.

The ant stuff is the one piece of GXP that we don't really use at
Google so there are probably some rough edges. If you have any
suggestions for improving it, please let us know.

[Al Sutton]

Would it be worth splitting the source for the ant related code out into
a separate source code directory? that way people can work on the core
code without needing to set up an ant supporting build environment.

Al.

[Laurence Gonsalves]

How would you run the tests? Our functional tests currently rely on
the compiler being invoked as part of the build.

[Al Sutton]

The code could be split out into a separate directory and the build file
could include those directories in the build path.

So you'd get something like;

runtime\src\......
compiler\ant\src\...

and the build.xml file would be updated accordingly.

This would allow other compiler implementations to exist alongside the
ant one (e.g. a maven2 plugin), and would allow developers to work on
the runtime code without needing to set up an ant supported dev environment.