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Understanding phases

a phase is a kind of target with special features:

• have no body, only dependencies
• dependencies are created on the fly (when a target is assigned to a phase)
• order of dependencies is not guaranteed
• are not prefixed in 'include', and never overriden

This is useful to make build modules easily reusable in a standard build (with standard phases), without requiring any specific orchestration.

Example

module A:

<phase name="foo" description="do foo" />

<target name=":bar" phase="foo" >
  <dobar />
</target>

module B:

<ea:include module="A"/>
<target name=":another-bar" phase="foo" >

By calling to

easyant foo

You will run ALL the targets bound the "foo" phase (:bar and :another-bar in my previous example)

In a module plugin it's possible to assign a target to a phase which is not declared in the build module. It makes the module dependent on the caller to declare the phase prior to the use call, and as such becomes a requirement of the module.