Ant Tasks for AccuRev

Originally posted 2006-03-11 05:14:02

When we bought AccuRev a little over a year ago, we knew AccuRev had no direct Ant support, but that it had a command line tool that we could use inside our Ant scripts. This setup worked well, but required lots of comments for all the command line switches we were passing so that future developers could maintain that section of the script. Besides, the aesthetics of that part of the script grated on me, so I cobbled together an Ant task for extracting files from AccuRev (the \”populate\” command), with plans to create more tasks that I’ve never gotten around to fulfilling. The task uses the command-line tool at its guts to do the actual extraction work. You can find the project here: SourceForge.net: Ant Tasks for AccuRev.

When AccuRev 4.0 came out, I noticed it offered an SDK. This intrigued me–I thought perhaps I could substitute SDK calls for the command-line tool inside the Ant task I’d written. This would presumably be cleaner, as it wouldn’t rely on an external tool residing in the user’s path. So, I contacted AccuRev to ask about the SDK. When they learned that we use TeamTrack for bug tracking, they told me that I didn’t need the SDK, that it was written for integrating AccuRev with bug tracking tools, and the integration with TeamTrack had already been written. I persisted, explaining that I wanted to use the SDK to integrate AccuRev with Ant. The AccuRev representative said she’d check into the appropriateness of the SDK for what I desired, and would get back to me.

A short time later, I got an email from the AccuRev rep, explaining that the SDK wouldn’t help me with what I’m trying to do. If I wanted to use Ant with AccuRev, however, I could look into this free tool. That was good for a laugh 🙂