There have been requests on the Java-Gnome mailing lists to start using ant instead of make for compiling the java files. The main reason for this is that it is far faster — make will run javac for every source file, even though each run of javac will build many class files. I’d rather not do this since we make a lot of use of gnu tools for finding native library dependencies, compiling jni code and also gcj native compilation.

Does anyone here on PlanetClasspath know how to get make to call javac only for the classes which haven’t been compiled already? i.e. make it check for existing class files rather than just source files. This must be a common problem for java developers in open source, hence I’m hoping somebody here might be able to help. Please send any ideas to java-gnome-hackers.