JavaScript will no longer work in Ant build files

[martindholmes]

...when run in Oxygen, due to its bundling Java 15, and we can expect the same at the command line eventually because of the long-threatened removal of Nashorn. We need to find another way for people to choose a directory, and to show a generated web page in a local browser.

[martindholmes]

@joeytakeda Can you test on Mac and see if a hard-coded exec calling firefox, as I've encoded in the build file now, will work on Mac too? Could you also test with safari, which we know will be there on a Mac?

[joeytakeda]

Doesn't work, unfortunately--Mac installs don't tend to create executables (I would have to had installed firefox using Homebrew: brew install --cask firefox but my computer is managed by my institution, so Firefox came pre-packaged).

In Mac, using open should work, which opens an HTML file in the default browser:

open $diagnosticsFile

But not sure how that would work with Linux, though (or Windows, of course)

[martindholmes]

Ah, that'll do -- I'll try that on Linux...

[martindholmes]

Nope, no good. I think I'll leave firefox for unix and windows; meanwhile, if you can add this:

    <condition property="isMac">
        <os family="mac" />
    </condition>

and get "open" to run for mac but not Linux, that would be great. I'm not sure whether "unix" is true for both.

[joeytakeda]

That doesn't work for me--mac is false and unix is true. Per http://ant.apache.org/manual/Tasks/conditions.html:

mac—for all Apple Macintosh systems prior to Mac OS X
unix—for all Unix(-like) operating systems, including Linux and Mac OS X/macOS

But I've just sent up a commit that runs the uname command to test what kind of unix OS it is (per https://stackoverflow.com/questions/19500112/can-i-detect-if-i-am-on-a-linux-system-and-not-a-generic-unix-system-using-ant). Which seems to work well. Let me know if that works for you.

[martindholmes]

That works for me. Let's leave it there until I can test on my work Windows vm. But we are going to get badly bitten by this Nashorn thing; any of our build files that use JavaScript will have to be rewritten asap.

[martindholmes]

Just flagging up that this is now thoroughly broken. We should remove the dependency on Nashorn before the scheduled end of the Endings project in March 2023.

[joeytakeda]

Just re-reading this thread and it seems we were focused on the opening stuff, but not the directory / file chooser. I wonder if we should just toss that entirely and say people need to set the directory at the command line (or use a prop file)?