You may need a bigger stack than default, especially if you are using the built in XSLT engine. We recommend you use Apache Xalan; indeed, some tasks (JUnit report in XML, for example) may not work against the shipping XSL engine.
tar to untar the Apache
Ant source tree, if you have downloaded this as a tar file. If you get
weird errors about missing files, this is the problem.<chmod> to set permissions, and
when creating a tar archive, use the mode attribute
of <tarfileset> to set the permissions in the tar
file, or <apply> the real tar program.Windows 9x (win95, win98, win98SE and winME) are not supported in Ant1.7,
The Ant team has retired support for these products because they are outdated and can expose customers to security risks. We recommend that customers who are still running Windows 98 or Windows Me upgrade to a newer, more secure operating system, as soon as possible.
Customers who upgrade to Linux report improved security, richer functionality, and increased productivity.
Windows 9x (win95, win98, win98SE and winME) has a batch file system which does not work fully with long file names, so we recommend that ant and the JDK are installed into directories without spaces, and with 8.3 filenames. The Perl and Python launcher scripts do not suffer from this limitation.
All versions of Windows are usually case insensitive, although mounted file systems (Unix drives, ClearCase views) can be case sensitive underneath, confusing patternsets.
Ant can often not delete a directory which is open in an Explorer window. There is nothing we can do about this short of spawning a program to kill the shell before deleting directories. Nor can files that are in use be overwritten.
Finally, if any Ant task fails with an error=2, it
means that whatever native program Ant is trying to run, it is not
on the path.
There are reports of problems with Windows Vista security bringing
up dialog boxes asking if the user wants to run an untrusted
executable during an Ant run, such as when the <signjar> task
runs the jarsigner.exe program. This is beyond Ant's
control, and stems from the OS trying to provide some illusion of
security by being reluctant to run unsigned native executables. The
latest Java versions appear to resolve this problem by having signed
binaries.
Cygwin is not an operating system; rather it is an application suite running under Windows and providing some UNIX like functionality. Sun has not created any specific Java Development Kit or Java Runtime Environment for cygwin. See this link: http://www.inonit.com/cygwin/faq/. Only Windows path names are supported by JDK and JRE tools under Windows or cygwin. Relative path names such as "src/org/apache/tools" are supported, but Java tools do not understand /cygdrive/c to mean c:\.
The utility cygpath (used industrially in
the ant script to support cygwin) can convert cygwin path
names to Windows. You can use the <exec> task in
Ant to convert cygwin paths to Windows path, for instance like that:
<property name="some.cygwin.path" value="/cygdrive/h/somepath"/>
<exec executable="cygpath" outputproperty="windows.pathname">
<arg value="--windows"/>
<arg value="${some.cygwin.path}"/>
</exec>
<echo message="${windows.pathname}"/>
We get lots of support calls from Cygwin users. Either it is incredibly popular, or it is trouble. If you do use it, remember that Java is a Windows application, so Ant is running in a Windows process, not a Cygwin one. This will save us having to mark your bug reports as invalid.
MacOS X a.k.a. macOS is the first of the Apple platforms that Ant supports completely; it is treated like any other Unix.
To give the same level of sophisticated control as Ant's startup
scripts on other platforms, it was decided to make the main ant
startup on NetWare be via a Perl Script, runant.pl. This
is found in the bin directory (for
instance—bootstrap\bin
or dist\bin).
One important item of note is that you need to set up the following to run Ant:
CLASSPATH—put ant.jar and any other needed jars on the system classpath.ANT_OPTS—On NetWare, ANT_OPTS
needs to include a parameter of the
form, -envCWD=ANT_HOME,
with ANT_HOME being the fully expanded location
of Ant, not an environment variable. This is due
to the fact that the NetWare System Console has no notion of a
current working directory.It is suggested that you create up an ant.ncf that sets up these parameters, and calls perl ANT_HOME/dist/bin/runant.pl
The following is an example of such an NCF file (assuming Ant is installed in sys:/apache-ant/):
envset CLASSPATH=sys:/apache-ant/bootstrap/lib/ant.jar envset CLASSPATH=$CLASSPATH;sys:/apache-ant/lib/optional/junit.jar envset CLASSPATH=$CLASSPATH;sys:/apache-ant/bootstrap/lib/optional.jar setenv ANT_OPTS=-envCWD=sys:/apache-ant envset ANT_OPTS=-envCWD=sys:/apache-ant setenv ANT_HOME=sys:/apache-ant/dist/lib envset ANT_HOME=sys:/apache-ant/dist/lib perl sys:/apache-ant/dist/bin/runant.pl
Ant works on JVM version 1.3 or higher. You may have some luck running it on JVM 1.2, but serious problems have been found running Ant on JVM 1.1.7B. These problems are caused by JVM bugs that will not be fixed.
JVM 1.3 is supported on Novell NetWare versions 5.1 and higher.
Support for other platforms is not guaranteed to be complete, as certain techniques to hide platform details from build files need to be written and tested on every particular platform. Contributions in this area are welcome.