Ant 1.5

This is the 1.5 version of Ant. It is available in both binary and source distributions.

Note: The tar files in the distribution use GNU tar extensions and must be untarred with a GNU compatible version of tar. The version of tar on Solaris and Mac OS X will not work with these files

Changes

The changes from Release 1.4.1 to Release 1.5 are detailed below. Please refer to the WHATSNEW file for more information.

Thank you for using Ant.

The Apache Jakarta Project
http://jakarta.apache.org/

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Always test available signatures, e.g.,
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or,
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or,
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Changes from Ant 1.5beta3 to Ant 1.5

Changes that could break older environments:

• The filesetmanifest attribute added to <jar> after the 1.4.1 release has been removed for now. This change may affect only the 1.5Beta/1.6Alpha users. An attempt will be made to add this feature back into Ant 1.6.

Fixed bugs:

• <zip> and friends would always update existing archive if you set the update attribute to true.
• To support backward compatibility with older versions, <pathconvert> will once again set the property, even if the result is the empty string, unless the new 'setonempty' attribute is set to false|no|off (default is "true").
• The manifest task would crash XmlLogger

Other changes:

• added **/.svn and **/.svn/** to the default excludes

Changes from Ant 1.5beta2 to Ant 1.5beta3

Changes that could break older environments:

• Project.getBuildListeners now returns a clone of the listener list. Changes to the returned list will not affect the listeners currently attached to the Project. It also means that it is safe to iterate over the returned list if listeners are added or removed during the traversal.
• <pvcs> default filenameformat has been different from Ant 1.4.1. Now it is different from 1.5beta1 and 1.5beta2.
• Some messages that are printed during startup will not be written to the logfile specified via -logfile as they might destroy the format of the file for special BuildLoggers (like XmlLogger).
• <pathconvert> won't set the property if the result is the empty string.

Fixed bugs:

• <available> could fail to find files or directories that happen to start with the name of the project's basedir but are not children of the basedir.
• Nested <property>'s inside <ant> can now be overriden by subsequent <ant> and <antcall> tasks.
• <xslt>'s outputtype attribute wouldn't do anything.
• <linecontains> filterreader could swallow lines.
• <sequential> used to configure the tasks (set their attributes) before the first task has been executed. This means that properties that have been set by nested task seemed to be unset for the other tasks in the same <sequential> element.
• <javac>'s sourcepath setting has been ignored by some compiler implementations.
• <javadoc>'s packagelist attribute didn't work.
• the plain mailer would always use port 25 in <mail>.
• Ant's default logger could swallow empty lines.
• ejbjar's iPlanet nested element now can process multiple descriptors.
• IPlanetEjbc was looking in the wrong place for four iiop files.
• <javac> would pass the -source switch to JDK 1.3's javac, even though it doesn't support it.

Other changes:

• <checksum> now uses a buffer (of configurable size).
• The "Trying to override task definition" warning has been degraded to verbose level if the two task definitions only differ in the class loader instance that has loaded the definition.
• Add a jvmargs to the ejbjar's weblogic element to allow additional arguments to be provided to the VM runnign ejbc. Document the jvmdebuglevel attribute which can be used to avoid warnings about interface classess being found on the classpath. Document the new <sysproperty> element which allows JVM properties to be defined. Added an outputdir attribute to allow the destination to be a directory into which the exploded jar is written.
• ejbjar now supports Borland Enterprise Server 5 and Jonas 2.5

Changes from Ant 1.5beta1 to Ant 1.5beta2

Changes that could break older environments:

• Properties will now be expanded in mail message bodies. This means that one $ sign will be stripped if your mail message contains the text $$.
• org.apache.tools.ant.taskdefs.Expand no longer extends MatchingTask.
• Available#setFile now again uses a File argument as it did in 1.4, this may break environments that have been adapted to the String argument version present in 1.5beta1.

Fixed bugs:

• When <move> attempts a rename, it deletes the destination file, if it exists, before renaming the source file. However, <move> was not checking if the destination file was actually a directory before trying to delete it.
• Make CVS Tasks to work under Cygwin.
• Fix LineContains to handle huge files elegantly without causing Stack Overflows.
• if you ask for the "classic" compiler on Java1.4, you get upgraded to "modern" because there is no classic compiler any more.
• the <http> condition was viewing 404 'not found' exceptions as success. Now it defaults to viewing any response >=400 as an error, and has an errorsBeginAt attribute you can use if you want a higher or lower value.
• <get> throws a build exception on an http authorization error, unless you have set ignoreerrors to true.
• <wsdltodotnet> was spelt in Wintel case: <WsdlToDotnet>. It is now lower case, though the old spelling is retained for anyone who used it.
• Merging of Manifests in jar now works as documented.
• paths that have been separated by colons would be incorrectly parsed on NetWare.
• runant.pl now supports NetWare.
• <tempfile> and <setproxy> tasks were in beta1, but not defined by default; They now are. <tempfile> fills a property with the name of a temporary file; <setproxy> lets you set the JVM's http, ftp and socks proxy settings.
• <available classname="foo" ignoresystemclasses="true"> failed for JDK 1.1 and 1.2, even if the class could be found on the user-specified classpath.
• <property environment=... /> now works on z/OS.
• forked <javac> failed for the wrong reason on JDK 1.1 - Ant would use a temporary file to hold the names of the files to compile under some conditons, but 1.1 doesn't support this feature. Ant will no longer try this, but you may run into problems with the length of the command line now.
• the refid attribute for <property>s nested into <ant> or <param>s nested into <antcall> didn't work.
• <replaceregexp> didn't work for nested <fileset>s.
• <javadoc> dropped sourcepath entries if no "interesting" .java source files could be found below them. This has been backwards incompatible and caused problems with custom doclets like xdoclet.
• Using the doclet, docletpath or docletpathref attributes of <javadoc> may have caused NullPointerExceptions.
• nested <filesets> of <javadoc> would include too much.
• <dependset> will no longer choke on <targetfileset>s that point to non-existing directories.
• <patch> didn't work at all.
• <replace> and <replaceregexp> now fail if the file they are working on is locked.
• <javadoc> would pick up the wrong executable in the combination JDK 1.2 and AIX.

Other changes:

• z/OS now gets detected by the os condition.
• <fileset> and <dirset> now have an optional followsymlink attribute that can prevent Ant from following symbolic links on some platforms.
• BeanShell is now supported in the <script> task.
• <ejbjar> under Weblogic attempts to use the ejbc20 compiler for 2.0 beans based on the deployment descriptor's DTD reference. Under weblogic 7.00 Beta this ejbc class has been deprecated. To avoid the deprecation warning use ejbcclass="weblogic.ejbc".
• <ejbjar> will add a manifest to the generated jar based on the naming convention in use. This overrides the manifest specified in the <ejbjar> attribute

Changes from Ant 1.4.1 to 1.5beta1

Changes that could break older environments:

• Important: Single $ signs are no longer silently stripped! Before you panic that we have broken all your build files, we have kept the old "$$" -> "$" behaviour. So only build files which accidentally had a $ sign in a string that was being silently stripped may break. We added this fix to stop newbie confusion; if you want to write a build file which works on ant versions 1.4.1 or earlier, stay with the double $$ sign rule.
• Shipped XML parser is now Xerces 2.0.1 along with the XML Parser APIs. XML Parser APIs is a separate jar that contains the necessary JAXP/DOM/SAX classes.
• <telnet> was fixed to expand properties inside nested <read> and <write> elements; before this only happened when you assigned the text to the string attribute. If you had $ signs in the string, they may need escaping.
• the RegexpMatcher interface has been extended to support case insensitive matches and other options - custom implementations of this interface won't work any longer. We recommend to use the new Regexp interface that also supports substitution instead of the RegexpMatcher interface in the future.
• <gzip> will throw an exception if your src attribute points to a directory.
• Unjar, Unzip and Unwar will throw an exception if the Src attribute represents a directory. Support for nested filesets is provided instead.
• It is no longer possible to overwrite a property using tasks like <condition>, <exec>, <pathconvert>, or <tstamp>. In some exceptional cases it will generate a warning if you attempt to overwrite an existing property.
• Taskwriters please note: Whenever tasks had any overloaded set* methods, Ant's introspection mechanism would select the last overloaded method provided to it by the Java Runtime. A modification has now been made such that when the Java Runtime provides a method with a String as its argument, a check is made to see if there is another overloaded method that takes in some other type of argument. If there is one such method, then the method that takes in String as an argument is not selected by the Introspector.
• The pattern definition **/._* has been included into the Default Excludes list.
• <propertyfile>'s <entry> element was modified to remove "never" as a value as its behavior was undocumented and flakey.
• The -projecthelp flag now only prints out targets that include the 'description' attribute, unless the -verbose or -debug flag is included on the Ant command line.
• Ant's testcases now require JUnit 3.7 or above, as they now use the new assertTrue method instead of assert.
• If the 'output' attribute of <ant> is set to a simple filename or a relative path, the file is created relative to ${basedir}, not ${user.dir}.
• The default value for build.compiler is now javac1.x with x depending on the JDK that is running Ant instead of classic/modern.

Fixed bugs:

• A bug existed that prevented generated log files from being deleted as part of the build process itself. This has now been fixed.
• Fixed bug where <move> ignored <filterset>s.
• Ant works properly with the combination of Java1.4/WindowsXP.
• Fixed bug where <java> used to sometimes invoke class constructors twice.
• Fixed bug with 4NT shell support.
• Fixed bug where ant would not perform ftp without remotedir being specified even though this was not mandatory.
• Fixed bug where ant would not copy system properties into new Project in ant/antcall tasks when inheritall="false" is set.
• <propertyfile> would not close the original property file.
• <ant> will no longer override a subbuild's basedir with inheritall="true".
• Fixed problem with the built-in <junit> formatters which assumed that only one test could be running at the same time - this is not necessarily true, see junit.extensions.ActiveTestSuite.
• <jar>'s whenEmpty attribute is useless as JARs are never empty, they contain at least a manifest file, therefore it will now print a warning and do nothing.
• <typedef> hasn't been all that useful as it couldn't be used outside of targets (it can now) and nested "unknown" elements have always been considered to be tasks (changed as well).
• <fixcrlf> would fail for files that contained lines longer than 8kB.
• Some junit formatters incorrectly assumed that all testcases would inherit from junit.framework.TestCase.
• <fixcrlf> dropped the first characters from Mac files.

Other changes:

• Selector Elements now provide a way to create filesets based on sophisticated selection criteria.
• Gzip and Bzip2 files can now be constructed in the fly when using the tar task without having to create the intermediate tar file on disk. The Untar task can also untar GZip and BZip2 files on the fly without creating the intermediate tar file.
• New optional type, <classfileset> added.
• <ejbjar> now allows control over which additional classes and interfaces are added to the generated EJB jars. A new attribute "dependency" can be defined which controls what classes are added. The addition of classes now uses the Jakarta-BCEL library rather than reflection, meaning bean classes are no longer loaded into Ant's JVM. The default dependency analyzer is known as the ancestor analyzer. It provides the same behaviour as the 1.4.1 version of <ejbjar>. If the BCEL library is not present, a warning will be issued stating the ancestor analyzer is not available. In this case <ejbjar> will continue to function but will not add super classes to the jar.
• <available> has a new attribute named ignoreSystemClasses.
• New task <cvschangelog/> generates an XML report of changes that occur on CVS repository.
• New filter readers: ClassConstants, ExpandProperties, HeadFilter, LineContains, LineContainsRegExp, PrefixLines, ReplaceTokens, StripJavaComments, StripLineBreaks, StripLineComments, TabsToSpaces, TailFilter.
• <copy>, <loadfile>, <loadproperties>, <move> support FilterChains of FilterReaders.
• New task <loadproperties> to load contents of file as Ant properties, with nested <filterchain> elements.
• New task <loadfile> to load a whole file into a property.
• New task <echoproperties> to list your current properties to the screen or a file.
• New tasks <bzip2> and <bunzip2> to pack and unpack files using the BZip2 alogrithm.
• New tasks <replaceregexp>, <checksum>, <translate>, <waitfor>, <manifest>, <vsscp>, <vssadd>, <vsscreate>, <splash>, <basename>, <dirname>, <concat>, <sourceoffsite>, <jarlib-available>, <jarlib-display>, <jarlib-manifest>, <jarlib-resolve>.
• A new combined <mail> task, which replaces the old <mail> and <mimemail> tasks, has been added. The <mimemail> task, and old SendEmail and MimeMail classes have been deprecated.
• Mail task allows specification of port number.
• Users can control what <zip> and <jar> must do when duplicate files are found. A new element <zipgroupfileset> allows for multiple zip files to be merged into the archive. In addition, <jar> also has another new attribute: filesetmanifest. The existing manifest attribute of <jar> now also accepts the name of a jar added through a fileset.
• gzip now checks that the zipfile is older than the source file before rebuilding the zipfile.
• TarFileset takes in three new attributes - fullpath, prefix and preserveLeadingSlashes.
• <move> attempts to rename the directory, if everything inside it is included, before performing file-by-file moves. This attempt will be done only if filtering is off and if mappers are not used. This is a performance improvement and there is no change otherwise in the funtionality of this task.
• Exec task has extra attribute "resultproperty" to get the return code into a property.
• Exec task prints a message when a timed-out process is killed.
• Added optional attributes - name, arch and version to the <os> task.
• Unjar, Untar, Unwar and Unzip now support patternsets to select files from an archive for extraction. Filesets may be used to select archived files for unarchival.
• Javac task allows debug levels to be specified. Debug levels will have an effect only when the modern compiler or the classic compiler (version 1.2 and higher) is used and debugging is enabled.
• Added support for specifying CVS_RSH in the <cvs/> task
• The attributes zipfile, jarfile, warfile and earfile (from the Zip, Jar, War and Ear tasks) have been deprecated and superseded by a new attribute "destfile".
• Added new conditions <isset>, <checksum>, <http>, <socket>, <contains>, <filesmatch>.
• <taskdef> and <typedef> will now emit a warning if a task/type of the given name already exists.
• A new revision of VAJ tasks: The most important new feature is the ability to execute VAJ tasks from the command line by exploiting the Remote Tool Access feature of VAJ.
• Improved support for Novell NetWare.
• Added an optional encoding attribute to <fixcrlf>.
• <apply> has a new attribute relative that allows users to pass the filenames as relative instead of absolute paths on the command line.
• References can now be copied into the child build by <ant> and <antcall> using nested <reference> elements or the new inheritRefs attribute.
• <fail> now supports builds to fail based on conditions via if and unless attributes.
• Ant now comes with two new BuildLogger implementations - one that can send emails containing a log of the build process (MailLogger), and one that colorizes the output based on message levels, using ANSI color code escape sequences (AnsiColorLogger).
• A "package" mapper type has been added to allow package directory names replaced with the dotted form.
• You can now specify environment variables in the <java> and <junit> tasks if the fork attribute has been set to true.
• -propertyfile command-line option has been added to load an entire property file just as -D properties are declared (as user properties). -D properties take precedence over -propertyfile specified ones.
• You can now set an ANT_ARGS environment variable to hold arguments you always want passed to the 'ant' command -- for example, if you always want to use a different logger or the -find flag.
• <tstamp> now supports a new "prefix" attribute to prefix properties set.
• You can now specify the -sourcepath for <javac> explicitly.
• <javac> now supports a new "listfiles" attribute to list the source files it's handing off to the compiler.
• The compiler implementation for <javac> can now be chosen on a task by task basis. The new "compiler" attribute of <javac> can be used to override the value of the build.compiler property, if set.
• <javac> has a new nested element, <compilerarg>, which allows you to specify additional args for the specific compiler you're using.
• <javac>'s "source" attribute is now enabled for jikes as well.
• <propertyfile>'s <entry> now has a 'unit' attribute to specify the increment/decrement unit on date operations.
• <property> now supports a 'prefix' attribute when loading from a file or resource.
• In Ant 1.4, a feature has been added to the <junit> task that would add ant.jar, optional.jar and junit.jar implicitly to the classpath - this feature can now be disabled by setting the new includeantruntime attribute to false.
• <style> behaves differently from any other directory-based task, as it processes all files that it finds in included directories in addition to the files matched by your patterns. There is now a new attribute, 'scanincludeddirectories', to suppress this behavior.
• <javadoc> now supports a <tag> nested element to provide the -tag option to the standard Java 1.4 doclet. The element is ignored when not running on Java 1.4.
• <ftp> can now chmod files on a remote server that supports "site chmod", as well as set the umask before transferring files, if the server supports "site umask".
• New <serverdeploy> "optional" task.
• <patternset> now supports nested patternsets.
• Perforce tasks now support a "failonerror" attribute (defaults to "true").
• Open Source application server JOnAS support: EJB hot deploy and deploy with <serverdeploy> and <ejbjar>
• Added new DirSet (<dirset>) datatype.
• <path> now supports nested <dirset> and <filelist> elements.
• <pathconvert> now supports nested <dirset> and <filelist> elements.
• <pathconvert>'s "dirsep" and "pathsep" attributes now accept multi-character values.
• <copy> task now has a 'failonerror' attribute to allow keep-going behaviour when the file to be copied is not found (defaults to "true").
• <uptodate> now has a 'srcfile' attribute to allow specifying a full-path filename.
• <exec>, <sql> and <java> now support append attributes to allow appending the output to an existing file.
• <java> now supports a timeout attribute analog to <exec> - it is highly recommended to only use it together with fork="true".
• <javadoc> now supports a source attribute to enable javadoc to handle assertions present in JDK 1.4 source code.
• <replace> supports a new replacefilterfile attribute that automatically turns all properties of a given file into replacefilters.
• An alias of <xslt> has been added to refer to the <style> task.
• The compiler implementation for <rmic> can now be chosen on a task by task basis. The new "compiler" attribute of <rmic> can be used to override the value of the build.rmic property, if set.
• <rmic> has a new nested element, <compilerarg>, which allows you to specify additional args for the specific compiler you're using.
• org.apache.tools.ant.XmlLogger now is a BuildLogger, rather than just a BuildListener. It can operate in either mode successfully.
• <junit> has a new attribute "showoutput". If set to true, output generated by tests will be sent to Ant's logging system as well as to the formatters (instead of sending it to the formatters exclusively).
• Ant has now a pluggable way to prompt users for input, which is used by the new <input> task. IDE integrators can provide an implementation of the InputHandler interface to decouple Ant's input from the console. An implementation that gets its input from a file for unattended builds is part of Ant's distribution.

  For more details see docs/manual/inputhandler.html.

• <patch> has a new attribute that selects the directory in which to run the command.
• <javadoc> now supports two new nested elements, <fileset> and <packageset>.