Ben Burton wrote:
(ii) Dive into the source code for ant itself (which I'm completely unfamiliar with), rewrite portions of this source code to eliminate the need for packages outside main, submit patches and then wait for the ant maintainer to verify and apply them.
No need for patches, the core Ant tasks don't need any packages outside main.
Ant will move to main as soon as a Kaffe 1.1 package is uploaded. The libant1.5-java package has already been created in Alioth's CVS tree. Changes to libservlet2.2-java have also been committed to use the new Ant package so it will also move to main very quickly.
Sure, (ii) is nice in the long run since it helps everybody. But if I don't have a lot of time then option (i) is more efficient for me, gives faster results and is more likely to be done correctly.
Upload Kaffe 1.1 and you'll see faster results than rewriting Makefiles. :-) Stefan