targets are executed even if the target that depend on them is skipped using if/unless

[Bruce Weirdan]

Either it's not clear from the documentation or is a bug: when I have conditional target (using "if"/"unless" attribute) and target is not to be executed due to the failed condition, the targets listed in its "depends" are still executed.

Test case: see attached file. What I expect is that path2-prereq target should be skipped, but it's still executed, even though the target that triggered it execution is not.

[bender]

My vote is that the documentation needs to be updated. Phing is basically a port/clone of Apache Ant and the Ant user manual is clear on the subject:

Important: the if and unless attributes only enable or disable the target to which they are attached. They do not control whether or not targets that a conditional target depends upon get executed. In fact, they do not even get evaluated until the target is about to be executed, and all its predecessors have already run.

 http://ant.apache.org/manual/using.html#targets

This behavior is fairly fundamental to the circular reference and dependency resolution. As pointed out in the same Ant manual page, using a dependent task to set a property is also the only way to accomplish a compound if or unless conditional check.

[hans]

We'll fix this at the documentation level.

[mrook]

(In [457]) Refs #186 - clarify if/unless usage in targets

[mrook]

This bug has been fixed in the SVN tree, revision r457.

Thank you for the report, and for helping us make Phing better!