> The problem is, as someone put it (somewhere on the nant > wiki), "the documentation assumes you've been using nant for 40 years" > > My opinion is, that if we can make this such that the average > high school student can set it up, build it and run it, then > they will, as will a ton of other people and companies. > > However, in my company, if I can't show them results in 20 > minutes (30 on the > outside) they will dub it, "too difficult and expensive to > maintain" and they will continue with their manual processes.
The problem with this idea is that NAnt is essentially a (new) language. It has concepts that are somewhat familiar to programmers - tasks and properties - but also introduces concepts that will be unfamiliar (Unless the programmer is familiar with functional programming styles) - being targets and dependencies. Through simple stepped examples (which I believe don't currently exist for NAnt, but there are mountains of literature available for Ant, both online and in print) someone could get simple build scripts going, but there's no guarantee that they will actually understand the concepts that have gone into that build script. That's like someone flicking through a foreign language phrasebook and then expecting to get by in a foreign country - sure it'll work, as long as noone talks too quickly... but of course the natives always talk too quickly. The concepts aren't all that hard to pick up though. It might be worth linking to some good Ant resources for getting up-to-speed... or soliciting for equivalent NAnt resources, or even some Ant-to-NAnt migration guides (covering things like if and unless actually test boolean true/false, rather than just existence... and properties are on the whole modifiable in NAnt, rather than Ant's set-once-then-silently-ignore-updates property model) What does need to be kept in mind though is that Ant has been around for a long time and has been post-1.0 for years... NAnt is still pre-1.0, and there's quite a lot of work going into getting it to do everything correctly (Which it does a remarkably good job of, all told!). I fully expect the documentation and literature to be much more mature and accessible by the 1.0 release :-) Until then, community goes some ways towards filling the gap. > Thanks for letting me ramble, and thanks for the help. > > Malcolm It's all good :-) -- Troy Disclaimer Message: This message contains confidential information and is intended only for the individual(s) named. If you are not the named addressee you should not disseminate, distribute or copy this e-mail. Please immediately delete it and all copies of it from your system, destroy any hard copies of it, and notify the sender. E-mail transmission cannot be guaranteed to be secure or error-free as information could be intercepted, corrupted, lost, destroyed, arrive late or incomplete, or contain viruses. To the maximum extent permitted by law, Immersive Technologies Pty. Ltd. does not accept liability for any errors or omissions in the contents of this message which arise as a result of e-mail transmission. ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by BEA Weblogic Workshop FREE Java Enterprise J2EE developer tools! Get your free copy of BEA WebLogic Workshop 8.1 today. http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_idG21&alloc_id040&op=click _______________________________________________ Nant-users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/nant-users
