Back in the early Ant 1.2 days when Ant still had to explain why it was there and IDE support was nowhere to be found (well, NetBeans had), Simeon Fitch started to work on a GUI front-end for Ant named Antidote. He put a lot of effort into it and was granted committer access to Ant almost immediately since we others simply couldn't keep up with committing his constant stream of patches otherwise. About half a year later Antidote attracted a second committer, Christoph Wilhelms, and we decided to separate Antidote's CVS module from Ant's.

Unfortunately Simeon had to leave the project shortly thereafter and Christoph got eaten up by his job much more often than was good for the project (and for him, I suppose). No other Ant committer wanted to jump in, some of us - like myself - simply don't enjoy GUI stuff enough, others didn't have enough time to share. Antidote turned from a code base that was developed too fast to keep up with into a dormant project.

Antidote is one of the examples I talked about a long time ago. Ant accepted the project even though the Ant community wasn't ready to take ownership of it. We have chosen the committers very carefully, but even then people will leave.

Now the Ant project has pulled the plug, the code base has been retired. This means we'll no longer accept patches for it, because we no longer want to pretend it was supported.

Antidote has found its resting place here - at least until somebody comes, picks it up and rejuvenates it.

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