[Biojava-dev] ant tasks

[Matthew Pocock]

Hi,

OK - we got into a mess this week (all right, I got us into a mess this 
week) by adding a new ant task - sablecc. You all saw the messages from 
people who couldn't make things work. So, we now have a solution to the 
problem of non-standard ant tasks we will need.

I've added a directory called ant-lib to biojava-live. In here goes the 
jars for all non-standard ant tasks that we use (so far, sablecc). Then, 
we put these jars into a classpath property on the taskdef element in 
build.xml that loads in the task. Hey presto! A more self-contained 
build process. It gives us great flexibility over what versions of tasks 
get loaded, and whould put an end to us finding that junit v x is 
incompattible with tasks compiled against version y, or so we hope.

The other option was to bundle a custom ant, to bundle a batch script 
for launching ant, or to rely on people downloading all the right ant 
tasks, none of which seem apealing, or have a good chance of working 
consistently.

If you think this is a bad idea, complain early and loud before I get 
too used to this.

Matthew