Description Ed Willink 2021-09-11 02:06:04 EDT

Rather than reopen the nearly 20 year old WONTFIX Bug 24130, let's try again and perhaps keep a "helpwanted" open for someone to eventually respond to.

Ant is a really important third party tool for which Eclipse IDE support is a disgrace. This forced others to develop MWE2, which I always use in preferemcde to Ant desp[ite Ant having a large library of documented tasks, whereas with MWE2 I often have to develop my own.

There are two major problems.

1) The taskpath is magic resulting in very hard to debug task not found diagnostics whenever Ant is launched for a new script.

2) Custom tasks are really hard to debug since the Java debugger doesn't work on the alternate src-ant tree.

It seems to me that an early developer hack used the External Tools as a very quick solution and no one sat back to review the hack.

If there was a conventional (Internal Tool) Ant Launcher

2) It would support Run/Debug making debugging Ant tasks no different to debugging Java or MWE2 tasks.

1) If a task is not found, it should be diagnosed in the Ant editor. Thereafter, the launcher should guarantee that what is visible in the editor is visible in the launched Ant session. And the newish Show Command Line capability would enable users to cut and paste a Java launch for non-Eclipse purposes.