Question

We do our build-management with Ant, we have to build scripts, one to create a dispatchment for our customer, with hash informations, the sourcecode, installation-guide etc., the other build-file lies in the created artefact, and is the build for the customer which creates the war file from the sourcecode.

for the build-file which creates the war file, i take the ant default build.xml, but how would you name the other file?

Answer 1

Here is a decision matrix:

• If you want to run an ant build from the command line in generated directory, then stick with the default build.xml. This way whoever runs the build will not have to struggle with ant command line switches for non-standard ant script file.

• If the other ant script is going to be called by some other script or excessive environment has to be set in order to run the build, then it’s probably better to give a custom name to that script. I would indicate in the file name that it’s an ant script.