The weirdest thing so far with NAnt

I just attempted to debug the NAnt build process in one of my companies projects. The devs was pretty frustrated as they'd just started up with NAnt. The error was that the csc task did not compile any of the source for a given project.

When slapping on a lot of failure handling and reporting verbose statements in the script I got this error from the sources element of the csc task:

"The fileset specified is empty after scanning"

The funny thing was that when I did a copy of the directory NAnt reported as empty and did a good ole' dir on it, all the cs files was present.

As a final act of despair I renamed the folder and project name for the project in question from "DataAccessLayer" to "DataDataDataData" and suddenly, with absolutely no other changes, the fileset element (DirectoryScanner) in NAnt found the files and compiled them properly. Renaming the thing back again to "DataAccessLayer" reproduced the error.

I am kinda embarrased to conclude that we solved this by renaming the project to "DataServices" but the reason for this error remains a case for Fox and Dana.

3 Comments

  • Nant is an open source app, you really should download the source and debug it if you have this kind of an error. That way you would find out why it's happening and could let the developers know about the bug (with much detailed description of the problem).

  • So true.. so true..

  • Jerry,



    In an ideal world, yes... but let's not forget that some of us have deadlines and don't have the time to go through that much trouble. an hour of fiddling and finding a workaround is much more acceptable to the managers than a day of trying to walk through someone elses source code.

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