yesterday we released Ant 1.8.3, go grab it from the download page. By pure coincidence it was released on a leap-day.
This release really mostly is a bug fix release, see the release notes for a complete list. There isnt anything major sticking out to me, but I know people have been bitten by some of the bugs - like forked Java processes hanging when they read from System.in - so for them the new release was important.
The dev team has decided to drop Java 1.4 support (as Ant's runtime) for trunk, so this may likely be the last release supporting Java 1.4. We have prepared a branch so we may be able to create more 1.8.x releases if a major bug raises its head. For trunk this means we'll be able to start using "modern" features like generics. It also means I can merge some improvements like Zip64 support from Commons Compress into Ant.
One of the fixes introduced a new class in order to better multiplex between System.out and System.err when forking a new process. This allows Ant 1.8.3 to be detected by either
<antversion property="Ant-1.8.3-or-later"
atleast="1.8.3"/>
or
<available property="Ant-1.8.3-or-later"
classname="org.apache.tools.ant.util.LineOrientedOutputStreamRedirector"/>
It's been the first time I acted as Ant's release manager since Ant 1.1 more than eleven years ago, quite a bit has changed WRT process but also automation since then. It wasn't as painful as I feared it to be, largely because we no longer ship optional tasks that require third party jars that cannot be downloaded freely.
path: /en/Apache/Ant | #