Changes from Ant 1.5.4 to Ant 1.6

Changes that could break older environments:

• This version of Ant can not be built with JDK 1.1 and requires at least Java 1.2 at runtime as well. Compiling for a 1.1 target is still supported.
• Targets cannot have the empty string as their name any longer.
• ant.jar's manifest does no longer include a Class-Path entry, so it is no longer possible to run Ant via "java -jar ant.jar" without manually altering the CLASSPATH. Instead of that a file ant-bootstrap.jar is included in the etc directory of the binary distribution, copy this to the lib directory and use "java -jar ant-bootstrap.jar" instead if you want to run Ant without the wrapper script (not recommended).
• The <script> task now requires Apache BSF instead of the older IBM version. See <http://jakarta.apache.org/bsf/>
• <xmlproperty> will no longer fail if the file to be loaded doesn't exist.
• XML namespaces are now enabled in the XML parser, meaning XML namespace declarations no longer cause errors. However task names containing colons will cause errors unless there is a corresponding namespace uri.
• The <ftp> and <telnet> tasks now require Jakarta Commons Net instead of the older ORO Netcomponents version. See <http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/net/index.html>.
• <input> will no longer prompt the user and wait for input if the addproperty attribute is set to a property that has already been defined in the project. If you rely on the task waiting for input, don't use the addproperty attribute.
• The Class-Path attribute in manifests will no longer merge the entries of all manifests found, but will be treated like all other manifest attributes - the most recent attribute(s) will be used.
• New Launch mechanism implemented. This moves some functionality from the batch files / shell scripts into Java. This removes environment limitations, for command issues, directory depth issues on Windows. Also allows a per-user library location to be used if the main Ant install is locked down.
• The Entry nested element of PropertyFile will not any more have its value attribute (actually increment) overwritten with the new value of the entry after execution.
• Output stored from a <java> or <exec> task is now exactly as generated. No conversion to platform end-of-line characters is performed.
• <translate> will now preserve line endings.
• <ftp> followsymlinks="false" in nested fileset definitions is explicitly required in order to exclude remote symbolic links (when doing a get, chmod, delete, rmdir).
• The values of the Copy#fileCopyMap variable has changed from String to String[]. (In java 1.5 terms it was Hashtable<String, String> and is now Hashtable<String, String[]>). This will affect third party code that extend Copy and override Copy#doFileOperations.
• <loadproperties> didn't expand properties while <property file="..."/> does, so they were not equivalent. This has been fixed, which means that propetries may get expanded twice if you use an <expandproperties> filterreader. Bugzilla Report 17782.
• User defined tasks and typedefs are now handled internally in the same way as predefined tasks and typedefs. Also tasks and typedefs are resolved at a later stage. This causes some differences especially for user defined task containers.
• <checksum> log message "Calculating checksum ..." has been degraded from INFO to VERBOSE.

Fixed bugs:

• Filter readers were not handling line endings properly. Bugzilla Report 18476.
• Filtersets were also not handling line endings properly.
• Expand tasks did not behave as expected with PatternSets.
• <property environment=... /> now works on OS/400.
• <cab> could hang listcab on large <fileset>s.
• The starteam stcheckout, stcheckin tasks now correctly compute status of files against whatever local tree they are run against and, optionally, will not process a file if it is current. Previously you had to process everything unless you ran against the default folder which wasn't the normal use-case for ant-starteam. The stlist task now similarly displays that status correctly making it a more generally useful tool.
• entity includes would cause exceptions if path names included spaces.
• addConfiguredXXX would not work for TaskAdapter wrapped tasks
• Fix <ilasm> outputfile testing so that the output file does not need to exist beforehand.
• Ant will now exit with a return code of 1 if it encounters problems with the command line arguments.
• ClassLoader creation changes to use a factory method in Project. A new class AntClassLoader2 implemented for 1.2+ specific features including Package information and addition of classes specified in the Class-Path element of a Jar's manifest.
• It is now possible in <exec> to resolve the executable to a project basedir or execution dir relative executable. The resolveExecutable must be used to pick up such executables.
• splash screen wouldn't disappear when build was finished.
• <exec> output and error streams can now be redirected independently to either a property or a file (or both)
• TarEntry's File-arg constructor would fail with a StringIndexOutOfBoundsException on all OSes where os.name is shorter than seven characters. Bugzilla Report 18105.
• <copy> and <move>'s failonerror didn't apply to filesets pointing to non-existant directories. Bugzilla Report 18414.
• The <stripjavacomments> filter sometimes removed parts of string constants. Bugzilla Report 17441.
• <antlr> will now recompile your grammar if the supergrammar has changed. Bugzilla Report 12691.
• <property env> will now work on Unices with /bin/env instead of /usr/bin/env. Bugzilla Report 17642.
• <jar index="on"> could include multiple index lists. Bugzilla 10262.
• The index created by <jar> didn't conform to the spec as it didn't include the top-level entries. Bugzilla Report 16972.
• <tar> and <zip> didn't honor the defaultexcludes attribute for the implicit fileset. Bugzilla Report 18637.
• The <replacetokens> filter would throw an exception if the token's value was an empty string. Bugzilla Report 18625.
• Perforce tasks relying on output from the server such as <p4change> and <p4label> were hanging. Bugzilla Reports 18129 and 18956.
• Improve exception and logging behavior of Perforce tasks. Bugzilla report 18154.
• build.sh install had a problem on cygwin (with REALANTHOME). Bugzilla Report 17257
• <replaceregexp> didn't work for multi-byte encodings if byline was false. Bugzilla Report 19187.
• <replaceregexp> was altering unnecessarily the timestamp of the directories containing the files to process Bugzilla Report 22541.
• file names that include spaces need to be quoted inside the @argfile argument using forked <javac> and (all JDKS). Bugzilla Report 10499. NB : a first correction was only introducing quotes for JDK 1.4 It has been changed to quote for all external compilers when paths contain spaces. Also the backslashes need to be converted to forward slashes Bugzilla Report 17683.
• Setting filesonly to true in <zip> and related tasks would cause the archives to be always recreated. Bugzilla Report 19449.
• file names that include spaces need to be quoted inside the @argfile argument using <javadoc> and JDK 1.4. Bugzilla Report 16871.
• <junit> didn't work with custom formatters that were only available on the user specified classpath when a timeout occured. Bugzilla Report 19953.
• <different> selector : make ignoreFileTimes effectively default to true and fix a bug in the comparison of timestamps. Bugzilla Report 20205.
• <different> selector can now be nested directly under a fileset Bugzilla Report 20220.
• <cvstagdiff> had a problem with "dd-MM-yy hh:mm:ss" formats Bugzilla Report 15995.
• <cvstagdiff> cvsroot and package attributes added to the root element tagdiff of the xml output Bugzilla Report 16081.
• <cvstagdiff> had a problem with aliased modules and with requests for multiple modules Bugzilla Reports 21373 and 22877.
• <cvstagdiff> could not parse properly the revision number of new files with CVS 1.11.9 or higher Bugzilla Report 24406.
• <fixcrlf> make fixcrlf create its temporary files in the default directory of FileUtils#createTempFile instead of the destination dir of fixcrlf. Bugzilla Report 20870.
• <ejbjar> implementation for Borland. Prevent the task from being blocked by error messages coming from java2iiop. Bugzilla Report 19385.
• <unzip>'s and <untar>'s nested patternsets didn't work as documented when the pattern ended in a slash or backslash. Bugzilla Report 20969.
• <fixcrlf> will now create the parent directories for the destination files if necessary. Bugzilla Report 20840.
• <xmlproperty> now handles CDATA sections. BugZilla Report 17195
• <translate> now translate tokens that are placed close together. Bugzilla Report 17297
• Nested websphere element for ejbjar does not support spaces in file name. Bugzilla Report 21298
• Don't multiply Class-Path attributes when updating jars. Bugzilla Report 21170.
• Do not overwrite the value (increment) attribute of PropertyFile nested Entry element. Bugzilla Report 21505.
• Prevent sysproperties with no key or no value from being added in <junit>. Bugzilla Report 21684.
• Allow references to be properly inherited via antcall Bugzilla Report 21724.
• ftp chmod failed when the remote system was UNIX and local system Windows Bugzilla Report 21865.
• ftp put with chmod failed when the remote system was UNIX and local system Windows Bugzilla Report 23143.
• ftp did not set the ascii mode explicity, causing problems with ftp servers having binary as default
• ftp was not able to download files when they were pointed to by symbolic links Bugzilla Report 14063.
• ftp is able to download also directories pointed to by symbolic links.
• replace would change \r\n into \r\r\n under Windows.
• junitreport with frames did not display a link for classes without a package or in the top package. Bugzilla Report 21915.
• Project.toBoolean(String) now handles null as argument and does not throw a NullPointerException any more.
• The socket condition will now close the socket created to test. Bugzilla Report 23040.
• <junit includeantruntime="true" fork="true"> replaced the CLASSPATH instead of adding to it. Bugzilla Report 14971.
• <splash> could fail on JVMs that use null to indicate the system classloader. Bugzilla Report 23320.
• <xmlcatalog>s only worked when defined inside of tasks. Bugzilla Report 20965.
• <csc> and siblings (<vbc> <jsharpc>) handle large filesets by automatic use of response files. Bugzilla report #19630

Other changes:

• Shipped XML parser is now Xerces 2.6.0
• All tasks can be used outside of <target>s. Note that some tasks will not work at all outside of targets as they would cause infinite loops (<antcall> as well as <ant> and <subant> if they invoke the current build file).
• Six new Clearcase tasks added.
• A new filter reader namely tokenfilter has been added. Bugzilla Report 18312.
• A new attribute named skip is added to the TailFilter and HeadFilter filter readers.
• The filesetmanifest attribute of <jar> has been reenabled.
• The start and end tokens for <translate> may now be longer than a single character.
• <setproxy> lets you set the username and password for proxies that want authentication
• <loadproperties> has a new encoding attribute.
• <echoproperties> can now create XML output.
• <echoproperties> has a new srcfile attribute that can make it read properties files and output them instead of Ant's properties.
• <filterset> will now resolve filters recursively.
• <input> has a new attribute that allows you to specify a default value.
• Added <image> task (requires JAI).
• <image> task has now proportions attribute in the <scale/> nested element instead of keepproportions (bringing in more functionality)
• New condition <isreference>
• <ftp> now has a preservelastmodified attribute to preserve the timestamp of a downloaded file.
• new rmdir action for <ftp> that removes directories from a fileset.
• <ftp> has attributes timediffauto and timediffmillis to use together with the newer attribute to tell ant to take into account a time difference between client and remote side. Bugzilla Report 19358.
• <ftp> has been optimized to go directly to the include patterns. This reduces scanning time under UNIX when followsymlinks="true" and casesensitive="true" (the default) Bugzilla Report 20103.
• The SOS and VSS tasks will no longer unconditionally prepend a $ to vsspath or projectpath.
• OS/400 now gets detected by the os condition.
• <arg> has a new attribute pathref that can be used to reference previously defined paths.
• <xmlproperty> has been improved, you can now expand ${properties}, define ids or paths and use Ant's location magic for filename resolutions in the XML file.
• <xmlcatalog> will now support external catalogs according to the OASIS "Open Catalog" standard - if resolver.jar (newer than version 1.0) from Apache's xml-commons is in your CLASSPATH.
• Starteam tasks now have support for revision labels and build labels. Checkouts now have the option of using repository timestamps, instead of current.
• new task <symlink> that creates and maintains symbolic links.
• new tasks <chown> and <chgrp> which are wrappers of the Unix commands.
• new task <attrib> to change file attributes on Windows systems.
• <style> has a new attribute reloadstylesheet to work around a bug in widespread Xalan versions.
• <tarfileset> has a new dirmode attribute to specify the permissions for directories.
• <fixcrlf>'s eol attribute now also understands "mac", "unix" and "dos".
• <classfileset> now picks up dependencies of the form MyClass.class. This works for the code generated by the Sun java compiler. It may not work for all compilers.
• a new attribute "globalopts" can be added to all Perforce tasks. You can put in it all the strings described by p4 help usage. Refer to the docs for more information.
• new Perforce tasks <p4integrate> , <p4resolve>, and <p4labelsync>
• <p4submit> will change the property p4.change if the Perforce server renumbers the change list. It will set the property p4.needsresolve if the submit fails, and the message says that file(s) need to be resolved.
• <replaceregexp> now has an optional encoding attribute to support replacing in files that are in a different encoding than the platform's default.
• The <exec> task may now have its input redirected from either a file or a string from the build file. The error output can be separated to a different file when outut is redirected. standard error may be logged to the Ant log when redirecting output to a file
• The <java> task also supports the input redirection and separate error streams introduced to the <exec> task. In addition, it is now possible to save the output into a property for use within the build file as was possible with <exec> in Ant 1.5
• The <javadoc> task <tag> subelement has been enhanced to allow files with tag mappings to be used.
• New tasks: <scp> supports file transfers, <sshexec> executes a command over SSH. They require jsch, a BSD licensed SSH library that can be found at http://www.jcraft.com/jsch/index.html
• New filterreader <escapeunicode/>.
• Support for HP's NonStop Kernel (Tandem) OS has been added.
• <cab>'s basedir attribute is now optional if you specify nested filesets. Bugzilla Report 18046.
• New task <sync> that synchronizes two directory trees.
• <apply> has new forwardslash attribute that can force filenames to use forward slashes (/) as file separators even on platforms with a different separator. This is useful if you want to run certain ported Unix tools.
• Copy has a new outputencoding attribute that can be used to change the encoding while copying files. Bugzilla Report 18217.
• The xml formatter for JUnit will now honor test case names set with setName. Bugzilla Report 17040.
• JUnit now has an attribute reloading, which, when set to false, makes the task reuse the same class loader for a series of tests.
• <concat> now supports filtering and can check timestamps before overriding a file. Bugzilla Report 18166.
• <junit> has a new attribute tempdir that controls the placement of temporary files. Bugzilla Report 15454.
• <jdepend> now supports a new nested element <classespath> which is the same as <sourcespath> but point to compiled classes (the prefered mode of operation for JDepend > 2.5). Additionally, nested <exclude> elements can be used to exclude certain packages from being parsed. Bugzilla Report 17134.
• The JProbe tasks now also work with JProbe 4.x. Bugzilla Report 14849.
• <javacc> and <jjtree> will now autodetect JavaCC 3.x and can use it.
• <sql> has a new attribute to control escape processing.
• <sql> is able to display properly several resultsets if you are running a compound sql statement. Bugzilla Report 21594.
• A new <containsregexp> selector has been added, that selects files if their content matches a certain regular expression.
• <antlr>'s debug attribute has been enabled. Bugzilla Report 19051.
• <mail> has a new attribute charset. Bugzilla Report 15434.
• <mail> has new attributes user and password for SMTP auth. maillogger can also use this. The implementation only works with JavaMail (encoding="MIME"). Implementation with plain mail remains to do. Bugzilla Report 5969.
• <mail> and mailloger support SMTP over TLS/SSL Bugzilla Report 19180.
• <mail> the attributes from, replyto ,tolist, cclist, bcclist can now contain email addresses of the form name <address@xyz.com> or (name) address@xyz.com Bugzilla Report 22474.
• <mail> (version PlainMail) prevent blank headers from being sent, make the order of the headers of plain mail messages predictable Bugzilla Report 22088.
• <zipfileset> can now be defined in the main body of a project and referred to with refid="xyz". Bugzilla Report 17007.
• A wrapper script for OS/2 has been added.
• <unzip> will now detect and successfully extract self-extracting archives. Bugzilla Report 16213.
• <stcheckout> has a new attribute "converteol" that can be used to control the automatic line-end conversion performed on ASCII files. Bugzilla Report 18884.
• Users can now modify the list of default excludes using the new defaultexcludes task. Bugzilla Report 12700.
• There is a new data type <propertyset> that can be used to collect properties. It is supported by <ant>, <antcall>, <subant>, <java>, <echoproperties> and <junit>.
• <concat> can now control the encoding of the output as well and optionally add new-line characters at the end of files that get concatenated but don't end in newlines. Bugzilla Report 12511.
• <rpm> will detect the rpmbuild executable of RedHat 8.0 and newer and use that if it is on your PATH. Bugzilla Report 14650.
• A new task <rexec> has been added that requires commons-net to work. Bugzilla Report 19541.
• <javadoc> now supports a nested <arg> element in addition to the additionalparams attribute.
• You can now determine the order of standard tags in <javadoc> via <tag> elements - you must not use the description attribute for them. Bugzilla Report 18912.
• <javadoc> now supports the -noqualifier switch. Bugzilla Report 19288.
• <javac>'s executable attribute can now also be used to specify the executable for jikes, jvc, sj or gcj. Bugzilla Report 13814.
• <javac> has a new attribute tempdir that can control the placement of temporary files. Bugzilla Report 19765.
• A new magic property build.compiler.jvc.extensions/ has been added that can be used to turn of Microsoft extensions while using the jvc compiler. Bugzilla Report 19826.
• You can now limit the parallelism of <apply> and <chmod> by using the new maxparallel attribute.
• With the new addsourcefile attribute, you can make <apply> ommit the source file names from the command line. Bugzilla Report 13654.
• <apply> and <chmod> now support nested <filelist>s as well as <dirset>s. Bugzilla Reports 15929 and 20687.
• <apply> and <chmod> will display a summary if you set the new verbose attribute to true. Bugzilla Report 19883.
• <copy>/<move>'s failonerror attribute can now also be used to continue the build if an I/O error caused a problem. Bugzilla Report 12999.
• new selector <type/> allowing to select only files or only directories. Bugzilla Report 20222.
• <java> and <junit> now support a nested <bootclasspath> element that will be ignored if not forking a new VM.
• <junit>'s nested <formatter> elements now support if/unless clauses.
• <ejbjar> cmpversion attribute added jboss element will look for jbosscmp-jdbc.xml descriptor if ejbjar has cmpversion="2.0" set Bugzilla Reports 14707 and 14709.
• <pvcs> config attribute added to set the location of a specific PVCS .cfg file Bugzilla Report 9752
• <mapper> has an "unpackage" mapper Bugzilla Report 18908
• Added <scriptdef> task allowing tasks to be defined using any BSF-supported scripting language.
• <touch>'s datetime attribute can now accept time with a granularity of seconds as well. Bugzilla Report 21014.
• <checksum> has two new properties: totalproperty and todir.
• FileUtils#createTempFile will now create temporary files in the directory pointed to by the property java.io.tmpdir/
• <unzip> and friends now supports an optional encoding attribute to enable it to expand archives created with filenames using an encoding other than UTF8. Bugzilla Report 10504.
• <patch> has a new attribute destfile that can be used to create a new file instead of patching files in place.
• OpenVMS is detected as a valid OS family.
• DirectoryScanner has been optimized for cases where include patterns do not start with wildcards. Bugzilla Report 20103.
• DirectoryScanner begins to be optimized not to scan excluded directories. Bugzilla Report 21941.
• Added keep-going feature. Bugzilla Report 21144
• The archives generated by <zip> and friends will now contain CRC and size information in the "local file header", thereby providing this information to applications that read the archives using java.util.ZipInputStream/. Bugzilla Report 19195.
• <copy> and <move> can now handle mappers that return multiple mappings per source path. This behaviour is enabled by using an enablemultiplemapping attribute. Bugzilla Report 21320.
• <exec> will now work on OpenVMS (please read the notes in <exec>'s manual page). Bugzilla Report 21877.
• <exec> will now have a new attribute spawn (default false). If set to true, the process will be spawned. Bugzilla Report 5907.
• <java> will now have a new attribute spawn (default false). If set to true, the process will be spawned. Bugzilla Report 5907.
• <parallel> now supports a timeout which can be used to recover from deadlocks, etc in the parallel threads. <parallel> also now supports a <daemons> nested element. This can be used to run tasks in daemon threads which the parallel task will not wait for before completing. A new attribute failonany will cause <parallel> to throw an exception if any thread fails without waiting for all other threads to complete.
• <zip> and friends will consume far less memory than they used to when run with compress="false". Bugzilla Report 21899.
• <if/> and <unless/> attributes added to <param/> element of <style> Bugzilla Report 22044
• <zip> and friends have a new attribute "keepcompression" that can be used to incrementally build an archive mixing compressed and uncompressed entries.
• <junit>'s XML formatter adds a new classname attribute to the <testcase> elements.
• new <permissions> type add permission handling to the code this type can be nested in the <java> and <junit> tasks. Bugzilla Report 22533.
• additional shortcuts for ant options (-d --> -debug, -e --> -emacs, -h --> -help, -p --> -projecthelp, -s --> -find).
• new selector <modified>. "cache" was renamed to "modified". Bugzilla Report 20474.
• <stcheckout> and <stlist> have a new asofdate attribute that can be used to checkout/list files based on a date instead of a label. Bugzilla Report 20578.
• New filter <concatfilter>. Adds the content of file at the beginning or end of a file. Discussion started at http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=ant-user&m=106366791228585&w=2
• New task <import>
• New task <macrodef>
• New task <presetdef>
• Ant libraries that can make use of namespaces to avoid name clashes of custom tasks