Well written, Tony.
I stated in Windows with Visual Basic 5, ASP 1.0, and FrontPage 98. (Yikes!) I made a friend who uses Java on Linux exclusively, about 6 months before C# & .NET came out. I have since become Java certified and have grown to love Gentoo Linux. That was the time of my "rebirth" in software development. That was almost 4 years ago, so the "open-source" world has become my world. I feel your pain, and want to say that it won't last. Anyone with a thirst for learning should enjoy all that "open-source" has to offer. Enjoy it! When something feels "foreign", remember that there is usually a mailing list, newsgroup, web-based forum or Wiki, or an IRC channel (or all of the above) to provide access to other users as well as the developers of the software in question.
In reference to Ant & NAnt, it may be comforting or at least interesting to note that there are Ant ports for PHP and Ruby as well as .NET. Learning NAnt will be an excellent knowledge base for whatever the future brings.
Best regards,
Kevin
Scilipoti, Tony wrote:
-----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Butler, Mark A Mr IPI Gramm Tech Sent: Wednesday, November 03, 2004 5:38 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: Kevin Williams; Duraiswami, Prabhuram Subject: RE: [Nant-users] Issues with installation of NAnt 0.84
Would someone PLEASE fix the help file? I'm reading the archives and
see new users having the same problem over and over.
Why would I think it's the help file. BECAUSE THAT'S WHAT IT TELLS YOU
TO DO!
+++++++++++++++
Hi. I get this via digest, so my apologies if I'm behind the 8-ball.
As a new NAnt user I just want to agree with the substance, if not the tone, of the post above. I suspect I know what the origin of many of these misunderstandings is, and it may help someone if I detail it here. Unlike the case with the original Ant, I think there are a lot of people like me who are coming to NAnt with no background at all in the open source "culture", no background at all in the world of the *ix platforms, and no background at all in Java, no background at all with CVS. Often we work for for-profit companies where "open source" has historically been a dirty word. We are people who cut our computing teeth entirely in Windows, often with no exposure even to C or C++. None of this means we're poor developers; it just means we're from the other side of the globe, metaphorically speaking. The reason we're here with you, suddenly, is that we've started using C# and are simply looking for a tool to help us manage building our applications. The name "Nant" crops up frequently in our searches, so we go investigate. We're figuring that like most everything else in the MS world it's going to be a black box commodity - something like WinZip or Acrobat Reader. It never occurs to us that we've crossed the line into a different way of thinking about software development and distribution. Many of the basic concepts - such as building someone else's software from source - are alien to us, and even if they're not, we're just not thinking in those terms at that point; we just want a tool to use. I'm not saying that this is always the right attitude, or otherwise making excuses for it; I'm just saying that I think it's the reality.
So the previous poster is correct: When a help file says, "build this source," you do it. What it should say, if you want to accommodate people like me, is something like, "If you want to get all tangled up and confused in the guts of how this software works internally, build this source. Otherwise, don't." To put it a different way, the build files for NAnt itself are way way WAY too complicated for effective use as a teaching tool. (The idea behind telling people to build NAnt is supposedly so they can see how the build files work, right?) Instead, it would be much better to have a "Hello World" sort of app that users can experiment with. This will help them learn a lot better, and will keep them out of building NAnt until they have the experience required to do so.
No doubt as I become more used to this stuff I will be embarrassed by this post, but presumably it will help someone who's in the same boat I was last week when I tried to follow the readme.
- Tony
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