Last weekend Antoine announced Ant 1.8.1. This is more or less a pure bugfix release which addresses a few important issues. The fix with the biggest impact likely is that <extension-point> and <import> finally work together as intended - and even documented.

The full list of issues raised against Ant that have been fixed with this release can be found in Bugzilla. We've adressed almost all issues raised against Ant 1.8.0 so far.

Thanks to the new <augment> task, detecting Ant 1.8.1 means either

  <antversion property="Ant-1.8.1-or-later"
              atleast="1.8.1"/>

or

  <available property="Ant-1.8.1-or-later"
             classname="org.apache.tools.ant.taskdefs.AugmentReference"/>

path: /en/Apache/Ant | # | Writebacks

Chris Sells translated a Clojure implementation of a function that descends into a directory in a "lazy" manner by Craig Andera into C# but his solution is so .NET 2.0 ;-).

Here's my take

    static IEnumerable<string> GetDirectoryDescendants(string path) {
        return Directory.GetFiles(path)
            .Concat(Directory.GetDirectories(path)
                .SelectMany<string, string>(GetDirectoryDescendants)
            );
    }

where I'd hope C# 4.0's compiler will be able to deduce the types for the SelectMany itself. Interestingly the C# 3.0 compiler does fine when I use a lambda expression instead:

    static IEnumerable<string> GetDirectoryDescendants(string path) {
        return Directory.GetFiles(path)
            .Concat(Directory.GetDirectories(path)
                .SelectMany(dir => GetDirectoryDescendants(dir))
            );
    }

path: /en/dotNet | # | Writebacks

So Apache Ant 1.8.0 is out and I'm supposed to follow a tradition I started with Ant 1.6.2. If you can be sure that you are at least using Ant 1.7.0 then the built-in <antversion> task/condition will do:

  <antversion property="Ant-1.8.0-or-later"
              atleast="1.8.0"/>

otherwise the trick of checking for a class that has been introduced with Ant 1.8.0 can always be used:

  <available property="Ant-1.8.0-or-later"
             classname="org.apache.tools.ant.types.resources.MappedResource"/>

path: /en/Apache/Ant | # | Writebacks

Antoine Levy-Lambert has recently built the first release candidate for Ant 1.8.0 and called for a vote, so we should be close to the first Ant release since eighteen months. This release mostly brings enhancements and bug fixes to many tasks and types (this is the real strength of Ant IMHO) but there also are a few core changes, the full list is here.

My personal top five changes (I know there are six items, but the first one doesn't count ;-):

extension-point and some changes in import and its new cousin include have been inspired by Easyant which can now use an un-patched version of Ant together with a custom ProjectHelper to create a build system quite different from Ant's original ideas. ProjectHelper is the mechanism that allowed me to sketch JavaFront or Nicolas Lalevée to write GroovyFront which lets you write build files in Groovy.

path: /en/Apache/Ant | # | Writebacks

When my Mum called us this morning to tell us that my brother's first daughter was born my kids celebrated "finally I'm a cousin".

Welcome Carina - being born on 11/11 will not always be easy in the rhine area - and congratulations Claudia and Maik.

path: /en/personal/family | # | Writebacks