[platform-ant-dev] New ant support

[David.Bailey@xxxxxxxxxx]

I downloaded the latest (4/12) integration build in the hopes that it would
meet
the stated goal of making it easier to run Ant scripts without
modification, but I
was disappointed.

We have a reasonably mature (2+ years old) collection of Ant scripts which
we
use to build our base environment Java classes.  We do not want to modify
them,
even by using "if" and "unless" attributes, to run in Eclipse.  We just
want to load
our source tree into Eclipse, run the Ant wizard, and have it build.
(Note: We can
do this successfully in NetBeans).

My understanding was that this was the goal for Eclipse 2.0.  However, when
I
attempted this in the 4/12 build, I still got the error message about
"Cannot use
classic compiler . . . .".  So I attempted to pass '-Dbuild.compiler= . .
.' to Ant
via the Ant wizard.  However, I also need to pass one additional property
using
this wizard, and it seems that if I pass '-Dbuild.compiler= . . .', then
the attempt
to define my other property is ignored.

So, as an experiment, I went ahead and added a <property> tag to the top of
my
build.xml file, just to see if that would allow me to define all of the
properties I need.
This does appear to work, but then I was getting an error in my <javac>
tasks,
stating that '-extdir' is not defined.  I do use the "extdir" property in
the <javac> task,
but I think I supply an actual value there.

In sum, we cannot consider Eclipse as a development IDE until it is able to
run
all of our build files without modifying them to be Eclipse-aware.  And we
would
really like to be able to use Eclipse, because it has a cleaner and less
flaky UI
than NetBeans.

It would also be very nice, though not a requirement, if it were possible
to define
all Ant command-line properties ("-DPROPERTY=. . .") only once for each
project.
I believe that currently, one has to redefine them each time you re-start
the IDE, but
I'm sure that I might be wrong about that.

Thanks,

--dave