I've been using Ant since the very early days. ("Tomcat is built with Ant. What is Ant?" Remember those days?) Since my use of ant does not usually involve anything esoteric, I have fallen victim to version inertia. Ant 1.4, 1.5, 1.6, 1.7 came out over the years, and I didn't much glance at the release notes.

Meanwhile, some of my build.xml files has grown organically. Since the code is modularized with a nice "B depends on A, C depends on B, etc..." structure, the build.xml reflects that with targets like "compile-A", "compile-A-test", "run-A-test", "compile-B", "compile-B-test", "run-B-test", ..., each with their own classpath definition.

And as we added modules, we copy and pasted big chunks of Ant code, bloating the build file.

This become unbearable recently. And I looked for ways to make the build file manageable again. That's when I found the two new features of Ant: import and macrodef. Both are available in the latest Ant 1.7.0 release.

I won't bore you with the details of how these two tasks work. But it did allow me to break my build file into a

template-build.xml

which contains a set of macro definitions, and a bunch of

A-build.xml
B-build.xml
...

files each importing template-build.xml and instantiate the set of targets for a module. The build.xml then imports all the A-build.xml, ... files and use all the targets in a systematical way.

If you are using Ant, import and macrodef are your friends, just like if you are using C, #import and #define are your friends.

This may be something that a casual GNOME user doesn't know.

A Sluug-discuss Thread (login is discuss/freely):

On 06:56 Mon 14 Apr, Weiqi Gao wrote:
> Nathan Neff wrote:
> > I'm running GNOME/Ubuntu.
> > 
> > Let's say I'm in a terminal, and want to open a PDF document, but don't 
> > know the name of the PDF reading program.
> > 
> > I can run "nautilus ." (don't forget the dot) and nautilus will start, 
> > pointing at the current working directory in the terminal.  You can then 
> > just double-click the file you want to open.
> > 
> > However, I'd like to avoid jumping to nautilus.
> > 
> > Is there a command that I can issue that will find the type of the file, 
> > and open it using the appropriate program?
> > 
> > In Windows, you can use the 'start' command, and I think in OSX you can 
> > use the 'open' command.
> 
> In GNOME, you can use the 'gnome-open' command from the command line. 
> It does the same thing that Nautilus does when you double click the file.

Cool! Is there an equivalent command for KDE?

-Jeff

I'd appreciate it if you can let me know what the corresponding command in KDE is.

(As I mentioned 609 days ago, in Cygwin the command is cygstart.)