Generations: file based inheritance

  The generations ant task implements a simple file-based inheritance algorithm.

Building

  You can use ant to build the 'generations.jar' file from the source files. 
  More information about ant can be found here: http://ant.apache.org/

Usage

  Before you can use the ant task in your build.xml file, you need to add the 
  following snippet to it:
  
    <taskdef 
      name='inherit'
      classname='org.mathdox.generations.InheritTask'
      classpath='generations.jar'
    />

  Where 'generations.jar' needs to be replaced by a correct reference to the 
  location of the generations.jar file.

Example

  The following ant snippet will copy files from the both the 'old' and the
  'new' directory to the 'combined' directory:

    <inherit destination='combined'>
      <generation dir='new'/>
      <generation dir='old'/>
    </inherit>

  Any files that occur in the 'old' directory that also occur in the 'new'
  directory are renamed such that '.parent' is appended to their names. For
  instance if both the 'old' and the 'new' directory contain a file 'foo', then 
  the 'combined' directory will contain both a 'foo' and a 'foo.parent' file. In
  all files, occurrences of the string '@parent@' are replaced by the filename 
  of the parent.

  It is possible to specify more than two generations, as long they are listed 
  from new to old:

    <inherit destination='combined'>
      <generation dir='newest'/>
      <generation dir='new'/>
      <generation dir='old'/>
      <generation dir='oldest'/>
    </inherit>

Copyright information

  Copyright (C) 2006 Technische Universiteit Eindhoven

  This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
  modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public
  License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either
  version 2.1 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
  
  This library is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
  but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
  MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU
  Lesser General Public License for more details.