Hi Basil,

I noticed an echo command in your example up there which reminded me of some ant scripts I wrote in a previous job…
The default log level for in Ant is _warning_, thus if you don’t specify a log level external tools will assume the text you are echoing is of warning severity.

Tools including Eclipse and CruiseControl take note of the log level and treat warnings differently from info, Eclipse for example renders warning text in a different colour.

As such, it became common practise for me to write:

<echo level=”info” message=”blah”/>

for any informational messages, omitting the ‘level=”info”‘ for text that I wanted to bring to the user’s attention.
This all became a bit cumbersome, so I ended up writing a macro like the following:-

<macrodef name=”say”>
<attribute name=”message” default=”"/>
<text name=”text” optional=”true”/>
<sequential>
<echo level=”info” message=”@{message}”>@{text}</echo>
</sequential>
</macrodef>

so I could then write:

<say message=”blah”/>

or

<say>blah blah blah</say>

and the message would be logged at the info log level.

It is also simple to extend the say macro to include the current date/time in the message, something I also found useful.

Just thought this might be interesting to some anyway… Cheers, and thanks for the blog.