Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 40106
Ant build tool needed
Last modified: 2008-05-01 11:38:00 EDT
Description of Problem: Ant, the cross platform build tool from the Apache-Jakarta project, is not currently included with the RedHat distribution. It has become as ubiquitous a build tool for open source Java projects as gmake is for native code projects. It's absence is a defficiency in the development tools available from the RedHat distribution. At the very least, it should be included with the PowerTools conglomeration. Including Ant in the distrubtion will help developers and people who want to play with Java source code get things done. I look forward to its inclusion, and to the day I can type `ant` to build my Java code just as I can type `make` to build my C code.
+1 We are using ant exclusively for our internal java development and continous integration efforts along with all the open source java projects we use and contribute to.
website/download location?
The Ant site is at <http://jakarta.apache.org/ant/>. Anonymous CVS, daily builds, and released versions are available around the Jakarta site proper, in addition to user and dev mailing lists, and CVSweb.
Here's a link to the latest released build, which is currently the most widely used version: <http://jakarta.apache.org/builds/jakarta-ant/release/v1.3/bin/>
RPMs and .spec files are always nice. Josh Lucas provides: There is an Ant rpm at http://releng.tigris.org, in the Downloads section. It puts all of the necessary jars into /usr/lib/java/lib and puts the scripts into /usr/lib/java/bin, sets the ANT_HOME env var to /usr/lib/java and puts the jars into your classpath. Forgive the paths but they are legacy for Tigris. If you would like the jars and scripts to be somewhere else, let me know and I can easily and quickly roll a new rpm. This particular one was built from cvs code last week. josh
Nalin or Tim, opinions?
ant:make::cvs:rcs :) Ant is really catching on. It seems that everyone I talk to about java development is using ant. People at anything from a top technology company to new open source projects. It seemed that the world has been ready for a better build system for some time now, and when one became available everyone is jumping on. Including it in the distro would make for one less step, and that should make everyone happy and help make it easier for people using ant to know that potential collaborators will have the needed tools.
For a bit more info on Ant see: http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-ant/ The quote that should matter to Redhat is this: Integrate testing into the build with Ant: The Jakarta Project refers to the Ant tool as the "make without make's wrinkles." Ant is becoming the de facto standard in the open-source world. The reason is simple: Ant is written in the Java language, which allows the build process to work on multiple platforms. This feature simplifies collaboration between programmers on separate OS platforms, a requirement for the open-source community. Thanks, Shane
Ant 1.4 has been released.
Assigning to people dealing with java and related things.
Ant 1.4.1 has been released, and is a good release to for Ant's introduction into rawhide.
going to drop the priority and defer this one. Step one seems to be better Java support.