Re: build ideas

[Etienne M. Gagnon]

On Wed, Oct 17, 2001 at 07:43:43AM -0600, Eric Blake wrote:
> I agree with the earlier sentiment that Ant has the drawback of
> requiring a working JVM installed on the machine, while make does not. 

This is just a atandard bootstrapping problem. (If you look at autoconf
and M4, you'll find the same kind of bootstrapping problem).

This problem is easily resolved by having:
1- Jikes
2- using a simple shell script to compile all java classes (no dependency
   tracking, etc.) [something like: find . | grep \\.java$ | xargs jikes -d 
classes ]

Once a first set of class files are generated, a Free VM can then work and 
execute
Ant, allowing a much nicer build environment.

In fact, neither Make nor Ant should be *necessary* to compile the java sources.
One needs these tools only to be able to get partial recompilation of sources,
or use them to do additional things like installing the code, or building
source/binary packages.

Another example of bootstrapping can be seen in Ant itself.  Ant uses Ant to 
build,
but the source package also contains an initial bootstrapping shell script.

So, I do not *personally* think that the dependency of Ant on Java is a valid
argument against using it for the Java part of Classpath.

Etienne
-- 
Etienne M. Gagnon                    http://www.info.uqam.ca/~egagnon/
SableVM:                                       http://www.sablevm.org/
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