Friday, September 06, 2019

Ant 1.10.7 released - Ability to include/exclude JUnit 5 "tags" during test execution

1.10.7 version of Ant has just been released yesterday. This release consists mostly bug fixes and some minor enhancements. The downloads are as usual available at https://ant.apache.org/bindownload.cgi

Notable among these bug fixes is a fix to a regression that happened in our 1.10.6 release. In that 1.10.6 release, we accidentally broke compatibility against Java 8. Ant 1.10.x releases are supposed to support Java runtimes starting from Java 8. However, during our previous release, our use of javac compilation attributes caused us to generate a binary which in some cases would run into issues when run against Java 8. This issue has now been fixed in this 1.10.7 release. More details about the regression are available in the bugzilla issue here https://bz.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=63457.

Among the enhancements that have made it into this newer release, includes an enhancement to the junitlauncher task. The junitlauncher task is meant for running JUnit 5 framework based test cases. In this 1.10.7 release of Ant, thanks to a contribution from Matthias Gutheil (https://github.com/MatthiasGutheil), this task now allows you to include or exclude JUnit 5 "tags" from a particular execution of tests. New attributes "includeTags" and "excludeTags" have been introduced to support selecting the relevant tags for execution. The junitlauncher task manual https://ant.apache.org/manual/Tasks/junitlauncher.html has the complete details.

As usual, any suggestions, feedback or questions can be raised in our user mailing list https://ant.apache.org/mail.html.