ant/WHATSNEW

Changes from Ant 1.1 to the current sources

Changes that could break older environments:
--------------------------------------------

* Semantics of <property> has changed again in the hope to be more
intuitive. ${} expansion now happens at runtime and <property> tags
living inside of targets only take effect if they are visited at
runtime.

As a side effect of this change, task's attributes get set at runtime
not at parser time as well, which might change the results of
<script>s or other custom tasks that reference other tasks by their id
attribute.

* copying of support files in <javac> has been removed - as well as
the filtering attribute.

* the <expand> and <keysubst> tasks have been removed.

* the ignore and items attributes of directory based tasks have been removed.

* the command line switches _not_ starting with - have been removed.

* Path and EnumeratedAttribute have been moved from
org.apache.tools.ant to org.apache.tools.ant.types.

* the class attributes of <available>, <java>, <rmic> and <taskdef>
have been removed.

* the src attribute of <chmod> has been removed.

* <patch> and <javadoc> have lost some of their attributes.

* <java> and <cvs> have lost some undocumented attributes.

* the Unix antRun script would search for command.sh in the directory
it changed to and invoke this instead of command if present. This
behavior has been dropped.

* <ejbjar> task syntax has been changed significantly

* <exec> is no longer implemented by org.apache.tool.ant.taskdefs.Exec. 
Custom tasks that rely on Project.createTask("exec") to return an
instance of this class are going to fail.

* nested <include> and <exclude> elements expect the value of their
name attribute to be a single pattern, they don't accept multiple
patterns anymore. Split them into multiple elements of the same type.

Other changes:
--------------

* New tasks: antstructure, cab, execon, fail, ftp, genkey, jlink,
junit, sql, javacc, jjtree, starteam, war, unwar, uptodate,
native2ascii, copy, move, mparse.

* copydir, copyfile, deltree and rename are now deprecated. They
should be replaced with the new copy, delete and move tasks.

* <java> uses ClassLoader of its own in no-fork mode if a classpath is
specified.

* <style> will create the necessary target directories and reprocess
all files if the stylesheet changes.

* New data types fileset and patternset - expected to get a broader use.
They as well as PATH like structures can now be defined on a global
level and later be referenced by their id attribute.

* You can specify environment variables to <exec>.

* <get> can check whether a remote file is actually newer than a local
copy before it starts a download (HTTP only).

* Added a -logger option to allow the class which performs logging to be 
specified on the command line.

* Added a -emacs option to tell the logger to leave out taskname adornments
on log output.

* <chmod> works on all files in parallel and supports multiple filesets.

* <replace> can now use tokens and/or values that cross line boundaries.

* <ejbc> optional task no longer uses a separate VM to invoke the ejbc tool.

* build.compiler supports now jvc as well.

* project specific help can now be obtained with the -projecthelp option.

* Added a -debug option to make -verbose less verbose (and more useful)

* Ant will now search for a file named build.xml in the parent directory
and above (towards the root of the filesystem) if you didn't specify
-buildfile and there is no build.xml in the current directory.

* <echo> can now write to a file and accepts nested text.

Fixed bugs:
-----------

* <chmod> didn't work when used as a directory based task.

* Path, Available, Property didn't resolve relative filenames with
respect to the Project's basedir.

* Project didn't interpret the basedir attribute correctly in all
cases.

* Nested <src> in <javac> caused NullPointerException.

* Corrupt Zip- and Jar-files ar now deleted if the task fails.