Ant Sucks
Topic: Rants
So I'm using Ant to try to automate installations, and it's getting in my way everytime I turn around. Here's some of the flaws I've uncovered so far:
1. Ant scripts can't handle nested quotes.This _really_ bites when you have to do <exec> tasks (which are frequent because ant sucks so badly).
Ant dies in a horrible (and unhelpful) way when you try to do something simple like:
<exec executable="bash" failonerror="true">
<arg line="-c 'echo \"hi\"'">
</exec>This gets you the retarded error message:
Element type "arg" must be followed by either attribute specification, ">" or "/>".Once again, I don't know how those dumbass Java developers working on Ant managed to screw this up. EVERY Unix command out there can handle nested quotes correctly. I blame Java.
2. the <cvs> task is broken.I don't know what it is, but I suspect it's related to the fact that I need to use the :ext: type of CVS as opposed to the :pserver: type. They probably never tested anything but the pserver method. Ironically, while searching for information about this, I found someone saying that the <cvspass> task was broken, but that seems to work fine for me.
It seems like if you want to accomplish anything -useful- in Ant, you have to fall back to <exec>'ing commands or scripts to do it for you, and then you hit issues getting Ant to recognize the status of those commands.
So essentially to use Ant, you're writing bash scripts. So why use Ant at all?
I hate all the automake
make scripts out there, but at least
make let you seamlessly integrate shell commands into your
make script.
Once again, those dumbass Java developers have to go and reinvent the wheel, and forget the little things, like making it round.
The sooner Microsoft kills Java, the better.
Posted by wmschumach
at 1:35 PM PDT
Updated: May 19, 2005 1:46 PM PDT