The thing about phing is... it doesn't work. Ok, to be fair, the basic features indeed do work. But as soon as you try to use any advanced features, you'll find that it either does not work at all, or it needs some really annoying workarounds to do what it is supposed to do.
But let's start from the beginning: Phing is a make-like build environment using PHP, and I use it for all my PHP projects (for things like copying the development files to my local server, to package several versions of the Joomla components and so on). For simple things such as selecting which files go into the distribution of the software, Phing does its job. But with growing demands (JCollection is getting bigger and bigger), I would also like to use such things as "replace tokens in a file with the contents of another file on the fly". According to the manual, this is one of Phing's features. But it does not work as stated in the manual, instead some really ugly workarounds need to be done. This is so annoying!
Is anybody aware of a good alternative?
