Ant (with Python extensions) good replacement for distutils?

[Neil Benn]

seberino at spawar.navy.mil wrote:

>I know distutils well but don't know anything about Ant except that it
>is a build
>tool from Apache project.
>
>Could it possible be better or as good as distutils?
>(There are extensions for Python.)
>
>Chris
>
>  
>
Hello,
      
          In my Java code I use ant extensively to organise files, run 
code, unit testing, upload war files, make my setup executables 
(commercial app with a single click install kinda thing), tag in my 
source repos, etc.  For this it is excellent, using it for Python; I 
don't think it will fly.  There is a lot of handy stuff that is there in 
ant for Java and Java programmers can easily add in extra ant tasks if 
they have something custom they wish to.  In addition getting an 
open-source community to accept anything written in Python is an uphill 
battle - not worth the grief <make way for Captain Toungue-In-Cheek>!!

    Anyways, I see a lot of requests on the ant mailing where people try 
to extend ant fast what it was designed for - this is the source of the 
majority of the complaints about ant.  Here's a good link that I refer 
to when I find myself swearing about ant being inflexible or clunky:

http://ant.apache.org/ant_in_anger.html

    However anyone up for Maven??  This is a build tool with a different 
philosophy than most others.

Cheers,

Neil

-- 

Neil Benn
Senior Automation Engineer
Cenix BioScience
BioInnovations Zentrum
Tatzberg 46
D-01307
Dresden
Germany

Tel : +49 (0)351 4173 154
e-mail : benn at cenix-bioscience.com
Cenix Website : http://www.cenix-bioscience.com