Ah, I see. The key point is that invoking a series of targets from the command line:
$ ant clean-all build-all doesn't work the same as: <target name="clean-and-build-all" depends="clean-all, build-all"> That's fine. I wasn't suggesting that Ant be changed. It's just confusing and perhaps should be clarified in the manual. I have also noticed that targets invoked using the <antcall> and <ant> tasks have this "command-line target behavior" as well. This can be even more confusing to an Ant script writer, since (particularly with <antcall>) the subordinate task seems like it is being called in the context of other executing targets. This "command-line target behavior" is easily explained by pointing out its equivalence to typing: $ ant clean-all $ ant build-all This explanation easily extends to the <ant> task too. The <antcall> task, however, seems like a much more likely candidate to ''play well with <target depends="">''. Has anyone ever suggested some mechanism to enable this? Perhaps a command-line option for Ant, or an attribute to <antcall> (and maybe <ant> as well)? As things are, any use of <antcall> causes additional calls to dependent targets which usually don't need to be executed again. ----- Conor MacNeill wrote: Michael Cepek wrote: > This doesn't seem right to me. Well, right or wrong, that is the way Ant has worked since the start and it will not be changed now. The paragraph you are quoting is about the dependencies in a single Ant target evaluation. So if Laurie had a target <target name="target3" depends="target1, target2"/> and he executes ant target3 then init will only be run once. IOW, ant target1 target2 is not the same beast. It says evaluate target1 and then evaluate target2. There are probably arguments for both behaviours. With Ant, you can do something like this ant build clean and be sure the clean is the last target evaluated even if build or one of its dependencies depends on "clean" > The "Using Ant" chapter of the "Ant User Manual" has always seemed > pretty clear on the subject: > > "In a chain of dependencies stretching back from > a given target [...] each target gets executed > only once, even when more than one target > depends on it." > > See text paragraph five of: > > http://ant.apache.org/manual/using.html#targets > > So shouldn't Laurie's "init" target only be executed once (without > having to fiddle with mysterious undocumented Ant settings)?!?!? > > Conor --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
