Ant, CVS and other things

[Wayne Swanson]

I am trying to set Ant up to do a complete (and clean) build from 
start to finish. All is well except for...

I am having to step out of the xml file when doing a checkout with 
cvs. The problem is getting the me/ant/cvs combination to put modules 
of source into directories that are deeper than cvs is used to going. 
Here is what the setup looks like:

Imaginary directory tree for sources on a development ws:

project/  <-- build.xml is here
project/src/
project/src/com/
project/src/com/company/
project/src/com/company/help  <-- source target
project/src/com/company/app  <-- source target


Imaginary directory tree for cvs repository on a server:

server/
server/repository/
server/repository/com/
server/repository/com/company/
server/repository/com/company/help  <-- Module name = help
server/repository/com/company/app  <-- Module name = app


I can checkout "help" and "app" from the Ant build.xml entry (in the 
cvs target block) but cannot get cvs to put the files in their proper 
directory level as long as the build.xml is more than one level above 
the expected directories. I am using the following arguments for the 
checkout (at least, this is where it was at the end of the day today).

co -d src/com/company help
co -d src/com/company app

After running cvs (via Ant) with these two or any of a dozen other 
command parameter varieties, the modules are always placed at the 
project/ level or at the project/src/ level. Am I asking too much from
ant by asking for multiple dirs or is it cvs that doesn't like it?

I realize I could move the build.xml down into the hierarchy deeper 
and make it work (not pretty but it would function) but would rather 
be able to start with a clean dir and have Ant do the complete build 
from dir creation to the final distributable with a cleanup afterward.

There is also a possibility of changing working directories to 
project/src/com/company/ and running cvs from there (where it would 
work fine) but so far, I haven't been able to change directories 
either using ant's <exec> or <apply>. :-)

This build file will eventually run on Warp Server, OS/2 and maybe 
some Linux workstations.

Thanks in advance for any help,
Wayne