So when I was playing with xml a while back one of the things that greatly angered me
was the inability to effectively organize xml files into a hierarchy or set that
actually makes sense. Now maybe I just don't understand all of the Xinclude stuff
that is being created but it seemed that there was a real lacking of any way at all to
have something like subdoc from sgml in xml. The question for ant users is:
how on earth do you all organize all of your build files? For smallish projects with
one or two people working on it you MIGHT get by with only using one build.xml file.
But when you are doing a larger project with many people one file is just not
acceptable at all.
Bascially, I want to do something along the lines of:
-classpath files
-property files
-target files
-specific package build scripts
-global build script
the idea being that I can reuse all of my build script components easily for both,
global and local, and various meta combinations.
ie:
classpath files:
globalLibClasspath.inc
packageLibClasspath.inc
packageClasspath.inc
obfuscatorClassPath.inc
fooClasspath.inc
property files:
globalProperties.inc
packageProperties.inc
fooProperies.inc
target files:
globalTargets.inc
packageTargets.inc
fooTargets.inc
Then those are all the components/parts I can use. So I make a packageLevel Build
script that is:
(all the .inc would get an !ENTITY entry)
<!DOCTYPE project [
<!ENTITY foo.inc SYSTEM "foo">
]>
<project name="foo" default="usage" basedir="." >
&globalLibClasspath;
&packageLibClasspath;
&packageClasspath;
&globalProperties;
&packageProperties;
&packageTargets;
</project>
and that is build file for THAT package. The package owner can make all the build
files and make his packageLevel build AND he can edit the global make file to have his
various .inc files so that when he changes them boom the global doesn't have to change
at all it just gets the newest versions via the !ENTITY.
Now I can easily re-use those components to make a build script for a set of packages
or for a global file.
The issue being that I have to retype the !ENTITY entry in each build.xml file that I
make :( Which really sucks but I don't see a way around it really ( PLEASE correct
me if I am wrong here ). Further there is the naming problem (we can maybe get around
this using namespaces, but even so one can just be facist and make people name their
stuff with their fully qualified package name or something (not that big of deal here
really ).
Is there any way to do what was outlined above? Or if I am just doing things totaly
whacky? What are others doing to make an attempt at being able to reuse build
components? And allow the easy additition of new packages into your global build
process?
thanks
msew
