Antmerge


What is it?
----------

Antmerge is a tool for merging two ant build files, producing a poor
mans inheritance as a result.

We wrote antmerge because of the large amount of duplication that was
occuring between build files for similar projects. 

There are a number of other similar tools out there. Antmerge is
probably the simplest. You can use standard tools to generate the 
ant files that it works on, and the source build.xml that it generates 
can be parsed by any IDE that understands ant. Once generated the ant
build file will work independantely of antmerge. 

For further details please see the documentation in the /doc
directory. 


Copying
-------

For copying conditions please see the file LICENSE. For futher
documentation, please see the directory /doc.


Who wrote this?
--------------

Antmerge was written as part of the myGrid project
(http://www.mygrid.org.uk), as a result of a need arising from this
project. We are releasing it in the hope others will find it useful. 

Antmerge was written primarily by Phillip Lord (p.lord@russet.org.uk),
and Nick Sharman (nick.sharman@cs.man.ac.uk), which employed by the
University of Manchester. 


Installation
------------

If you have the binary distribution you should be ready to go. Just
unpack it. 


If you have the source distribution you will need to build first with
ant. The packaged build file, (which is itself generated by antmerge
from the antmerge-in.xml file) should work cleanly by typing "ant".

If you wish to get rid of the warning message on unix, build to a jar
with

"ant jar"

and then delete the classes directory 
 
./build/classes

Antmerge will use class files in preference to the jar, but prints the
warning message when it does so. 
