Java™ Application Development on Linux - Dator

9.3 Obtaining and Installing Ant217His solution was Ant, which we will from now on refer to as ant. Whyant? Well, he suggests that it might be because ants are little things 2 that buildbig things. He has also suggested (in his preface to the O’Reilly book Ant: TheDefinitive Guide, Jesse Tilly and Eric Burke) that it might stand for “AnotherNeato Tool.” We’re inclined to put forth the former, but believe the latter.James Duncan Davidson wrote ant and contributed it to the Apacheproject, so it is Free Software. And it makes the problems cited above ratherpiffling. Through the rest of this chapter we will describe how.9.3OBTAINING AND INSTALLING ANTYou can obtain ant from the Apache Web site. 3 Which version you downloadwill depend on your system and your needs. There are stable releases and dailybuilds. Unless you have a compelling need for a feature not yet in a stable release,we would suggest you stick with the most recent stable release. As of thiswriting, that is version 1.5.1.If you are using RedHat, or another Linux distribution that uses theRedHat Package Manager, rpm, then the simplest way to install would be todownload the RPMs linked from the Web site and install those:$ rpm -i ant-1.5.1-3jpp.noarch.rpmYou have two other options besides the trusty old RPM method. First,you may download a binary tarball, a word often used for a compressed filecreated with the tar utility, or you may download and compile the antsource code.Let’s take these each in turn.9.3.1 Installing a Binary TarballBinary distributions of ant are available in .zip, .tar.gz, and .tar.bz2formats. Utilities are available for all of these formats for Linux, although you2. Not so little anymore. As of this writing, the head of the CVS tree for ant weighs in at justshy of 48MB, and there are 5,239 files in there! These totals include a lot of project documentation,but even considering only the src subdirectory, we are still looking at 18MB and1,687 files. It is probably incorrect to call ant a “little thing” these days.3. http://ant.apache.org/