Bug fixed!

I added a class to contain many filesets and Ant builds just fine! After reading Terence's post on submitting bugs, I tried to svn diff my changes. That was not successful because the only thing I changed was that I added a file. I tried to then svn import my file into the repository but it failed. Well, when all else fails, gzip it! I gziped the file in the correct directory structure and submitted it in the bug issue page. We'll see what the Ant gurus think of my patch!

Bug selected...

And the winner is...

Bug 48621 – Allow with multiple base directories

I chose this primarily because of some help that I found in the discussion portion of the bug tracking database. One of the commenters pontificated on a potential solution. I figured I'd give it a try.

OK, I've got my three bugs to look at

Truth be told, these are retroactive blog posts. I've already picked and turned in the Ant bug.

Bug 48058 – tar task looses file permissions
Bug 48829 – Javac task only accepts *.java files
Bug 48621 – Allow with multiple base directories

I chose these three because they 'seemed' somewhat elementary and would not take a major understanding of many portions of Ant. My plan was to investigate these three bugs and hopefully one would identify itself as the logical choice.

Eliminating Build Errors for Ant

OK, so I didn't really detail the extent pain it took to get Ant built from source in Eclipse. It essentially took downloading the source (either from SVN or the source download page) and importing it into eclipse. There are a number of ways to accomplish this. The next stage was to see how many errors you get when you try and compile. LOTS. So there are a ton of errors that essentially are similar to errors you get when using a class that you have no import statement for. In this case, there were all the import statements but Eclipse couldn't 'find' the class files. OK, so off to the Ant manual. In the installation instructions there is a dependency table with a list of libraries and their uses within Ant. Just about all of them were necessary. So I had to download the jar and then link to it in my Eclipse project. 15 libraries later, we're at 0 errors and open for business. Could their be another way? Well I have heard that Maven supposedly solves this problem but I Don't think Maven and Ant like each other too well so maybe that's the reason its awkward.
Sam

can I please find a bug ?

ok so with an ant built from source the only thing let to take the next step is find a bug. I've been on this problem for a couple of weeks. I suppose I just need to pick one and start working on it but for some reason I'm convinced that will lead to weeks of confusion.

ant releases

It never occurred to me how 'low-tech' coordinating for a new release would be. The vote consists of people responding to the corresponding email thread with their comments and a [ ] or [ X ] denoting voting nay or aye respectively. Just thought it was interesting, though I'm not sure if there is a better way. There is no real infrastructure to the ant project. There is a wiki, some source repositories, and the bug database. So it does appear that the majority (if not all) coordination must be occurring on the developers mailing list. Of course that is what ant says, I just didn't actually think it worked like that. Now on to trying to find a bug to fix...

System.out.println("Hello World");

That's right...make for Java folks it doesn't get any more exciting. No need to go to TMZ or XKCD, all your daily entertainment will be contained right here! This blog is to record my interactions with the Apache Ant project for my CS680 (Distributed Software Development) course at Drexel University, Spring 2010.

I will hope to use this experience both as a learning experience for the course I'm taking but also to finally get my lazy self involved in an open source project so I can do it more in the future. I will be working with Terence and Jim to flex our 1337 5k!llz to the Ant community.

The title of this blog is reference to a very odd cartoon character from the 1960s (Atom Ant).