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In-Depth Information
His solution was Ant, which we will from now on refer to as
ant
. Why
ant
? Well, he suggests that it might be because ants are little things
2
that build
big things. He has also suggested (in his preface to the O'Reilly topic
Ant: The
Definitive Guide
, Jesse Tilly and Eric Burke) that it might stand for “Another
Neato Tool.” We're inclined to put forth the former, but believe the latter.
James Duncan Davidson wrote
ant
and contributed it to the Apache
project, so it is Free Software. And it makes the problems cited above rather
piffling. Through the rest of this chapter we will describe how.
9.3
O
BTAINING AND
I
NSTALLING
A
NT
You can obtain
ant
from the Apache Web site.
3
Which version you download
will depend on your system and your needs. There are stable releases and daily
builds. Unless you have a compelling need for a feature not yet in a stable re-
lease, we would suggest you stick with the most recent stable release. As of this
writing, that is version 1.5.1.
If you are using RedHat, or another Linux distribution that uses the
RedHat Package Manager,
rpm
, then the simplest way to install would be to
download the RPMs linked from the Web site and install those:
$ rpm -i ant-1.5.1-3jpp.noarch.rpm
You have two other options besides the trusty old RPM method. First,
you may download a binary
tarball
, a word often used for a compressed file
created with the
tar
utility, or you may download and compile the
ant
source code.
Let's take these each in turn.
9.3.1
Binary distributions of
ant
are available in
.zip
,
.tar.gz
, and
.tar.bz2
formats. Utilities are available for all of these formats for Linux, although you
Installing a Binary Tarball
2. Not so little anymore. As of this writing, the head of the CVS tree for
ant
weighs in at just
shy of 48MB, and there are 5,239 files in there! These totals include a lot of project documen-
tation, but even considering only the
src
subdirectory, we are still looking at 18MB and
1,687 files. It is probably incorrect to call
ant
a “little thing” these days.
3.
http://ant.apache.org/
