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Showing posts from March, 2010

Musings about build systems

I was just hacking the other day our somewhat horrible hairball of an ant build to try to mold it to my understanding of how a build should work when I had a sort of an epiphany about why on earth I dislike Ant so much. Apart from the syntax (and I think it is universally agreed by now, that XML is a horrible, horrible language for scripting like tasks), what hit me is that while ant is okay for simple one-shot single project builds, it really falls on it's knees as soon as you start building complex modularized systems where you need some sort of dependency management. Now, before I go on, I must mention that I have heard of alternatives like make, Maven , Buckminster , b3 and the ilk, but I really don't know much about any of those (well, by the time I started to write this piece, I had taken a peek at Buckminster). I am not really what you would call a "build person" - I'm using Ant, because it's what comes with most of the projects I've been invol