Dorkish Deliberations

Fine. I haven't written. I get on these kicks where everything else takes priority and I re-jigger everything that I'm doing. I'm getting more into D programming and the XRX architecture now, and I haven't done anything with the first project . I have a five minute attention span. I blame society.

I just had a really obvious thought. I was going to use Subversion as a version tracking mechanism for my project, but I guess I don't need to. I'm all alone. Not in the metaphorical, universal sense, but I don't have anyone else who needs to access and modify the files. So forget about the whole Subversion thing.

The DITA Open Toolkit (DITA-OT) uses Apache Ant to do its build processing. I have now realized what a confusing warren of build files there is for building the samples. I'm sure someone really cool and hip on Ant could look at it and grok it, but I have never been accused of coolnes or hipness. (No, don't gasp, it's true!) What I have determined, is that there is some setup required. I will do this within the calling script (.bat file) rather than making permanent environment variables. The script will start out by setting DITA_HOME to the directory in which I installed DITA. set DITA_OT=C:\jdn\DITA-OT1.4.2.1 Then in that directory, I place a setuplocalenv.bat file that has some more variables REM Get the absolute path of DITAOT's home directory set DITA_DIR=%~dp0 REM Set environment variables set ANT_OPTS=-Xmx512m %ANT_OPTS% set ANT_HOME=%DITA_DIR%tools\ant set PATH=%ANT_HOME%\bin;%PATH% REM This last one is actually all one line. set CLASSPATH=%DITA_DIR%lib; ...