What's the best way to bootstrap an Ant script installation? Say you're going to introduce an Ant script to automate tasks in dev environment, and you're going to add new functionality as you go, possibly modifying the script a lot, and introducing various dependencies along the road, like JARs, new tasks and whatnot.
Say have a bunch of users of your script who can't be bothered to download those dependencies manually, and you want to automate the process whereby they bootstrap their installation, and also update it when more functionality becomes available, like, say, a new target "doc-pdf" requiring some library to generate documentation in PDF. I'd imagine targets like in a UNIX package manager: ant self-check ant self-update ant self-upgrade This should download the required JARs and place them in some suitable directory, possibly ~/.ant/lib. I know Maven does this sort of dependency management, but our choice is Ant. What's the best or most standard or your preferred way of doing this? What about Ivy? Does it work for that kind of stuff? Not too complex? (One thing I personally dislike is checking JARs into your version control system, so that's not exactly the solution path I'm most interested in. I can see why people may choose to go there, I just don't want to follow that path myself.) -- Michael Ludwig
