[platform-ant-dev] Ant Console vs. Debug Console

["Darin Wright" <Darin_Wright@xxxxxxx>]

I appreciate the feedback and requests we have received from users/developers regarding Eclipse's Ant integration.

One of our goals is to combine the Log Console with the Debug Console (thus, only having one console, and the ability to look at past output from previously run Ant scripts). However, there are a couple of features the Log Console supports that are not provided by the debug console:

* Structured Output: The log console provides a tree view of the output, corresponding to Ant tasks. The debug console does not support structured output.
* Colored coded output for five message types (error, warning, information, verbose, and debug). The debug console provides colors to distinguish between standard error, out, and in.

Thus, I would like to hear from users if they actually use these features, and if they would be missed. We do not neccessarily need to lose these features - but adding these concepts to the generic debug console would be more work. We need a way to prioritize the work.

Please note that one of our goals is to provide "hyper-links" from Ant error output in the console, to the associated task in an editor. This might be viewed as a replacement for determining which task error output is associated with (if the tree view is used for that currently). As well, we could provide links from information messages to associated tasks in an editor.

I will also post this note to the newsgroup, where a wider audience may be available.

Thanks,

Darin