Ant: A Case Study in How Not To Write An Error Message

Monday, May 2nd, 2005

After I complained about about build failures in Ant 1.6 on Cafe au Lait, a couple of Ant developers wrote to me with various suggestions and FAQ references. They were nothing I hadn’t tried before though, and didn’t explain why I could make the build work with Ant 1.5 and not Ant 1.6. However what really annoyed me about this whole situation was not the bug. It was the lazy error message.
(more…)