Interesting blogs on build systems these days.
I found Bill's list of what's wrong with Ant via Bruce Eckel's Feedback Wiki.
Most of Bill's points seem to be addressed with 1.6.
"Ant encourages duplication across build files."
As he already notes, <import> is your friend. And as it even allows you to override targets from the imported build file, you get quite a powerful reuse system.
"Ant isn't recursive."
<subant> is what he's been looking for. This also addresses his next point that "Ant's enforcing of downward dependencies".
"Ant doesn't understand dependencies."
True. He's talking about dependencies between projects.
When Dominique first submitted <subant>, it contained a mechanism to declare project dependencies and have subant sort out the build order. We stripped that functionality but I'm seriously planning to bring it back with a pluggable dependency analyzer - still, it isn't there yet and won't be for quite some time.
path: /en/Apache/Ant | #