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List:       ant-dev
Subject:    Re: OS detection:  am I missing the obvious?
From:       Benjamin Reed <ranger () befunk ! com>
Date:       2000-11-08 12:17:27
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Diane Holt wrote:

> I'm not trying to re-open this debate, honestly, but I just have to say
> that I find it interesting that you think heading towards something like
> "configure" is desirable, just to avoid having a test-for-value.
> Personally, I find "configure" to be one of the yuckiest mangled mess of
> spaghetti-ed crud I've ever run into (and I've run into a considerable
> amount of mangled crud over the years, so that's saying quite a lot).

I second this.  :)

It seems to me that if you're going to have properties like os
available, it should be made easy to use those properties to do
conditionals, without having to go through touching files or other weird
hackish things.  Otherwise, there's no point in giving the architecture
you're running on, if you have to jump through hoops to do anything
architecture-specific based on that information.

I understand that Ant is supposed to be simple, but an OS-specific check
like this is going to be very common (I'm going through it as well on
our project, at the moment I'm getting around it with properties
files... Windows 98.properties, Linux.properties, etc.  Ugly.  But still
not nearly as ugly as Makefiles  ;)  There's a point where simplicity
just means that the user (well, developer?) is going to end up
implementing something over and over again.

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