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Bug 335696

Summary: Ant support needs work
Product: [Eclipse Project] Platform Reporter: Aybiss <bachowny>
Component: AntAssignee: Platform-Ant-Inbox <platform-ant-inbox>
Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME QA Contact:
Severity: enhancement    
Priority: P3 CC: kentarou, Michael_Rennie
Version: 3.6.1   
Target Milestone: ---   
Hardware: PC   
OS: Windows XP   
Whiteboard:

Description Aybiss CLA 2011-01-28 10:30:39 EST 
Correct Product/Component - Eclipse, Ant Support. If they're in the lists, I certainly can't be assed finding them!

Ant support is a great feature but a couple of things make it hard. Firstly, it doesn't seem to detect the installed JDK and instead requires pointing to tools.jar - which I believe is a deprecated way to get a compiler.

The second and more important problem is the triggering of the script. The options don't allow for the script to be run before a debugging session. It also fails to fire before an automatic build - if nothing is built then the script does not run. This unfortunately renders it useless to me as I need to know my external build tools are being run before a debug/run regardless of whether anything has changed within my project. 

...and it's a total PITA to manually build in an IDE that doesn't have a BUILD BUTTON on the toolbar! :-\

PS none of this would be necessary if there were pre/post-build steps or if I could use relative paths for locating things. You guys might be going for the most 'outside the box' design for an IDE but there *are* reasons that every other IDE has these things. ;-)


-- Configuration Details --
Product: Eclipse 1.3.1.20100913-1228 (org.eclipse.epp.package.java.product)
Installed Features:
 org.eclipse.jdt 3.6.1.r361_v20100714-0800-7z8XFUSFLFlmgLc5z-Bvrt8-HVkH
Comment 1 Kentarou Fukuda CLA 2011-02-06 12:56:28 EST 
Does this relate to Platform Ant project?
Comment 2 Michael Rennie CLA 2011-02-07 09:50:13 EST 
(In reply to comment #0)

> doesn't seem to detect the installed JDK and instead requires pointing to
> tools.jar - which I believe is a deprecated way to get a compiler.
> 

Ant does correctly detect the installed JRE, as does the external tools support. How are you launching / running your scripts?

> The second and more important problem is the triggering of the script. The
> options don't allow for the script to be run before a debugging session. It
> also fails to fire before an automatic build - if nothing is built then the
> script does not run. This unfortunately renders it useless to me as I need to
> know my external build tools are being run before a debug/run regardless of
> whether anything has changed within my project. 
> 

Did you check the Console view? All output from external tools builders is sent there - basically it is the Ant (org.apache.ant) output.

> 
> PS none of this would be necessary if there were pre/post-build steps or if I
> could use relative paths for locating things. You guys might be going for the
> most 'outside the box' design for an IDE but there *are* reasons that every
> other IDE has these things. ;-)
> 

Eclipse supports that as well, relative paths of course being dependent on your current working directory. We also have variables that can be used.
Comment 3 Michael Rennie CLA 2011-04-18 09:18:04 EDT 
Marking as worksforme without further input