build - Make ant quiet without the -q flag?

Question

I have an ant buildfile that is often run from vastly different environments. By default, I'm looking for the same behavior as using:

ant -q

However, since some team member's configurations vary, specifying the -q option in each person's environment is not easily accomplished in a uniform way (some people run ant from eclipse, some from the command line, some from debugging/profiling tools, etc. Each with a different method for specifying ant arguments like -q)

So I'm seeking a way for the ant file to call itself quietly...

Something like the following would be ideal:

<target name="default">
    <antcall quiet="yes" target="build" /> <!-- doesn't work -->
</target>

Can anyone think of anyway to accomplish something like this? All I'm after is for the build to run quietly whenever the default target is ran, regardless of whether -q is set.

Answer 1

One option might be to set the logging level from within the target.

You can access loggers by means of a short script task. Something like:

<target ... >
    <script language="javascript">
        var logger = project.getBuildListeners( ).firstElement( );
        logger.setMessageOutputLevel( 0 );
    </script>
    ...
</target>

I'm not familiar with how Eclipse calls Ant, but it might be necessary to iterate over all the build listeners to get 'silence' all round.

Suggest that how ever you end up doing this, you make it easy to switch back to verbose running.

Edit - response to comment: You can access project properties from within the script using project.getProperty():

<property name="verboseFlag" value="1" />
<script language="javascript">
    var logger = project.getBuildListeners().firstElement();
    var verboseMode = project.getProperty( "verboseFlag" )
    if ( ! "1".equals( verboseMode ) )
        logger.setMessageOutputLevel( 0 );
</script>

(Somewhat old) API docs are here, including for the project class.