Looks as if we'd have a release candidate for Ant 1.6.3 by the end of this month. This is supposed to be early enough for the upcoming Netbeans and Eclipse releases, so they can bundle 1.6.3 final.

This is going to be mainly a bug fix release, but a whole lot of Gump experience with Java 5 and Kaffe has also found its way into this release. <javac target="1.1"> will work (Ant will print a warning, though) and <rmic> will know when it doesn't need to recompile on JDK 1.5. Many more things are supposed to work on Kaffe now.

For an almost complete list of changes see Ant's WHATSNEW file. No really big things, but still a few important enhancements, for example

  • <ant> can now invoke multiple targets in one go.
  • Changed default tempdir for <javac> from user.dir to java.io.tmpdir. Useful if you run Ant embedded in a servlet container, for example.
  • <macrodef> with default values set by properties would be seen as new definitions when called twice with different properties. This led to annoying "Trying to override" messages.
  • <setproxy>'s authentication should now work on all JDKs.

path: /en/Apache/Ant | #