My cape and sword

In the Walt Disney short animated movie Ferdinand The Bull the matador never get to show off his cape and sword. Sometimes I feel like the matador and want to show off my cape and sword (i.e. my programming skills), but for various reasons I can’t. The bull (i.e. the task at hand) might be… Continue reading My cape and sword

The case of the failing ant copy filterset

I wanted to set a couple of Windows environment variables from Ant. The environment key-value pairs are stored on the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetControlSession ManagerEnvironment key in the registry. As a starting point I used the registry editor to export all keys. I called the file environment.reg.template and modified it to look something like this: Windows Registry Editor… Continue reading The case of the failing ant copy filterset

Ant “replace” task does not preserve Unix file permissions

This is probably a well-known fact for everyone who has used Ant on Unix for a while, but an annoying discovery for me who have been hiding under a C++ rock. The five year old bug report File Permissions not preserved in replace task pretty much says it all: Java couldn’t stat files, and it… Continue reading Ant “replace” task does not preserve Unix file permissions

Apache Ant is regrettably (?) using XML

I’ve done some Apache Ant build file hacking today and that made me recall that the original author of Ant, James Duncan Davidson, actually regretted using XML as the file format. Mysteriously missing from today’s world wide web, but fortunately captured by the Wayback Machine, the blog entry Ant and XML is worth reading. The… Continue reading Apache Ant is regrettably (?) using XML