Automake/autoconf for Ant
Yesss, it’s a good idea. Ant is a substitute for make, designed to be free of make’s wrinkles. It is, however, only a make substitute, and allows only to write build files.
The reality shows that most of the builtfiles are written ad hoc and are of varied quality. For example, given the source code application X, there’s no common way of specifying how to build and install this application in a given path or how to build the documentation.
Wait a second… haven’t we had a similar problem with makefiles? 
Yessss, the answer is automake/autoconf. How about a similar tool for Ant, without autocont/automake’s wrinkles?
How this would work? Well, I don’t know, but I’ve got some ideas:
- there’s a template file (XML?), which specifies which files are in the project and what the dependencies are.
- AutoAnt (XSL?) generates a build.xml file having the following targets:
- clean
- build
- dist
- install
It also checks for required modules (e.g. Xerces, COLT, etc) and generates a startup file, which runs the application with required libraries (similar to –with-xxxx for configure.in).
Note that even if all jar files are in a standard location (/usr/share/java/*.jar) you still need to add these files to a CLASSPATH to be able to run the application. SOmetimes these files are not in the same location, but the application should still be able to run.
Well, that’s for ideas… maybe I will write it one day.