PANT version 0.17
=================

This is a set of useful functions to facilitate building packages in
an automate build environment. It has facilities to ease common tasks
and provide a HTML build log of what happened. It has come about
because I found neither ANT or NANT did quite what I needed, and there 
is "more than one way to do it".

THE PHILOSOPHY

The basic philosophy is that you can probably use make or visual studio
or similar to do the heavy building. There is no real need to replicate 
that. However stuff like checking out of CVS/SVN repositories, updating
version numbers, checking it back in, running test harnesses, and similar
are things that make is not good at. 

XML is not a programming language, but you can describe a lot of what you
want using it, which is what ANT/NANT basically do. However there is always
something you want to do, which can't be described in the current description
language. In these cases you can call out to an external routine to do things.
However it seems much easier to provide a number of useful subroutines in
a scripting language, which help you build things. Then if you need to do
something slightly of piste, you have all the power right there.

The other thing I want to know about is "did it work" and if it
didn't, what went wrong? To this end plenty of logging is required so
the build can be tracked. As the build is probably going to be remote,
HTML seems the obvious choice to report in, so you can just look at it
from a web server.

This is the first version, it is currently evolving to meet my needs,
but could well take into account other peoples needs. 


INSTALLATION

To install this module type the following:

   perl Makefile.PL
   make
   make test
   make install

DEPENDENCIES

This module requires these other non-standard modules and libraries:

XML::Writer, Archive::Zip, File::Copy::Recursive

COPYRIGHT AND LICENCE

Put the correct copyright and licence information here.

Copyright (C) 2005 Julian Onions

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the same terms as Perl itself.