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Make
has always been used in conjunction with shell scripts and other tools; it
functions largely as dependency-sensitive glue binding together all of the
commands to build and link C programs. So, if pressed, one could probably
write all of the things you mention using Make. The point of Ant and NAnt
is that they dramatically simplify the everyday tasks and make it far easier to
detect and fix mistakes in the script.
Good Morning/Bonjour
I would like to ask Gary if there any
version of make has capability to handle building a solution such as the Nant
Task solution
keeping in mind that the solution task handles
all permutations of environment development, uat, qa, release as well
as
the ability for solution task to include n number of csproj/vbproj
projects
as well as the ability for the solution task to exclude n
csproj/vbproj projects
Merci/Thanks,
Etats Unis/US
Martin-
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Thursday, September 22, 2005 8:57
AM
Subject: Re: [Nant-users] Build target
from command line without dependencies
While
I see many advantages (and disadvantages) in NAnt, I can't think
of
anything off the top of my head that it can do, but that can't be
done
with ordinary make/bash (or other scripting
language). NAnt
benefits from having a centralized
repository of tasks, so that we don't
each have to build our own
solution task from scratch, but that's a
packaging deficiency with
make/bash, not a technical one. It's also
somewhat easier
to grok than make, but on the other hand there are some
things that
make can do easily, but which are tricky or more work to do
in NAnt -
such as adding a project-wide pre or post compile step.
What sort
of things did you have in mind?
Hi,
just some feedback about an experience I had
a few months ago (actually the first non-trivial thing I did with NAnt
outside a strict build scope).
We have some third party library
(namely, Syncfusion Essential Suite) which is massively used in our
components (here the CCNet+NAnt setup drives 60+ solutions). A new release
came out with a change in the licensing strategy (the content of the .licx
file had to be updated), and also with a breaking change of assembly names
(such as : each previous dependency was split in two, plus another 'Core'
dll had to be referenced).
With NAnt I was able to :
- determine
the project files where a change was required (thanks to fileset + patterns
+ recursivity + small c# custom task)
- create at the same place a new
licx with the right content (when not available, with a file exist +
copy)
- update the csproj files ( = interacting with the xml content,
based on a quick regexp + replace custom task)
- launch a test build by
iterating over all the solutions files (fileset + pattern + exec) to ensure
that everything was running smoothly
- do the checkout / checkin stuff
with VSS automatically (using nant contrib vss tasks) during the whole
operation
The whole operation took me one day (alone, and working in
isolation from the team).
The other ways would have been to use the
GUI-only tools provided and let people do their changes (= chaos, most
likely!), or use a make / bash / batch script, but in my case I dare say I
would have been much slower, and much more likely to cause
errors.
The things I especially like about NAnt/Ant for such
operations is the error handling (by default, it fails fast, where a script
usually does not fail so quickly by default - it requires more care to
achieve this), the tasks which are provided (such as interacting with VSS),
and the cheap extensibility (custom tasks, or scripts, comes very
handy).
I came to realize that NAnt can be pretty valuable even for
one-shot operations such as this one. I really felt *power* when I did all
this in parallel.
cheers
Thibaut
--
[blog] http://www.dotnetguru2.org/tbarrere
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