Re: [platform-ant-dev] Source of Ant DTD file?

[Alf.Schiefelbein@xxxxxxxx]

> Where did the DTD  and XML files that Planty uses for Ant and the Ant
tasks
> come from? Specifically, XDOCtasks.xml, ant1.5b.dtd, anttasks_1.5b.xml,
and
> tasks.xml.

ant1.5b.dtd
Was generated by the <antstructure>  task from Ant1.5 Beta. After creating
it
I also formated it a little to make it readable and edited two or three
things by hand,
where I knew that the dtd is wrong. Therefore one task would be
regenerating the dtd with
Ant 1.5.1 and pray (or test ;-) that the outcome resembles what Ant behaves
like.
The dtd that is used by planty is hardcoded in the
PlantyCompletionProcessor:
public static final String ANT_1_5_DTD_FILENAME = "/ant1.5b.dtd";

Hint:
I sometimes even use Planty for editing other XML files by just changing
the dtd.
This works fairly well for simple dtds. Therefore, if I/we would have time
and want
to do it best, I would suggest extracting an XML Editor out of Planty and
let the new
Ant Editor inherit from this XML Editor. Though, this may just be a task
for after 2.1.

anttasks_1.5b.xml
Is a result of a merge of XDOCtasks.xml and tasks.xml. Merging is done by
the de.gebit.planty.tools.TaskXMLFileMerger. After merging some editing was
done by hand, too. This file is actually used by Planty to provide the
description.
The class TaskDescriptionProvider parses anttasks_1.5b.xml to provide the
descriptions.

XDOCtasks.xml
This file is a result of an xdoclet. In the CVS of Ant under proposals one
can find
that there is the idea to provide all documentation for Ant by xdoclet
using
additional javadoc tags in the source. Unfortunately, this is far from
ready to use.
Ant Task developers are nowadays asked to provide documentation in the
source
using xdoclet or by an HTML document. Most of the docs are still only HTML
:-(.
XDOCtasks.xml is the result of running javadoc with this Ant specific
xdoclet.
- I hope that I explained this well enough, since I am not the one that did
this.

tasks.xml
This file is a result of parsing Ant's official HTML Documentation with a
perl
script. If you really want to continue with those dirty tricks, I might
also send
you an ugly perl script that did the task for us. Unfortunately it is not
enough
of just running the script, since Ant's HTML files are not all structured
in the
same way. Some work by hand had been done here, too.

So, if we talk about the legal issue, I'ld say that all descriptions fall
under the
Apache license, with some minor changes done by hand.

> If you didn't write these files (they're huge, so I'm almost hoping you
didn't
> :) ), then we need to know the license conditions before we can include
them
> in Eclipse.

> Also, Eclipse ships Ant 1.5.1, so the files need to be updated.

As you can imagine, updating those files is not a task of much fun. Though
if you really think that there is a big need of updating the files, it
might be
an option to contact the Ant developers and confront them with this issue.
Maybe they have a better idea of extracting the descriptions from the
docs.



Alf

PS: Jared, you don't need to send me those mails directly. I am reading
this
list regularly, at least as long as Planty is an issue. And this kind of
late
answers of mine, are a result of the timeshift between us.