I'm generating documentation from output of code that, among other things, executes ant. I want the generated document to be fully reproducible (deterministic) i.e. given the same input files the output document must be exactly the same. But I cannot achieve this without filtering ant output, because ant prints "Total time" in the end, and the time can be different between runs. I have tried the "-S" flag, but that also suppresses output from java programs executed by ant using the <java> element. So that does not help. Using a custom logger is not an easy enough solution for my needs. So I propose one or several of the following: - option "--nototaltime" that just suppresses the Total time line, regardless of other flags - option "--deterministic-output" that tells the intention more clearly, in case there are other possible nondeterministic output cases Yet another option is to make another flag like "-S" that suppresses all _irrelevant_ output. Now it's printing all relevant output produced directly by ant, but this new option would also print all relevant output (actually, all output) by code executed with <java> and <exec>
Oh, yet another option: instead of new flags just add a new logger implementation to the ant distribution. Or several of them.
Please? Can you at least reply? I might even be willing to implement this myself, if I have reason to believe the feature will be accepted.
I don't think we would add a new flag, we might think about adding a different logger implementation. But as you are the first person to ever ask for this feature, I wonder how widespread demand for it is. In either case you can create this logger and publish it independent of the Ant distribution - and we could link to it.