« It’s time to write a better build tool

That’s what I’ve heard more than one time in the last months, half of my friends complain about maven, the other half is just almost happy with ant. The rubists are generally happy with rake, the biggest problems are on the java/.net world.

So I thought about branching ant and rewriting it in a slightly different way, using yaml instead of xml and having always only one option for any task parameter. I always hated and found difficult to remember how to do things in ant since there are always two or more good alternatives (like why there’s a dir and a file parameter option in the delete command? Isn’t a directory a file?).

So, I don’t think I’ll be able to allocate a lot of time to this, but I would love to hear something from you, ideas and comments.

In the last weeks I’ve started to write a shared mind map with Staffan Nöteberg on micro time boxing… Maybe we can do the same with this topic.

Ping me if you’re interested.