Matthew and Steve, This is a well known issue. It goe sbeyond ant and is related to the capabilities of the Javac compiler. Two solutions have been proposed and patches submitted for a while now. These are very old now and would need to be brought up to date. We had a recent discussion about this again. Adding this facility requires a facility to analyse class dependencies, either at a source level or at a class level. That increases the size of ant considerably and there is no general agreement if that is a worthwile thing to do. There are also a number of opinions on how to provide this facility. A quick summary would be
1. integrate into Javac task and have it automatically handle the dependencies 2. separate dependency analysis into a separate task with an auxillary file which can be used by Javac task. Since dependencies change more slowly than code this can save time when javac'ing 3. Have dependency analysis and checking separate, cleaning up generated files that are out of date. This leavs the javac task as it is now 4. Its a compiler issue (a Javac limitation) which should not be dealt with by ant 5. Clean all and use Jikes to compile. It'll be faster anyway. I don't necessarily advocate any of those positions. The two patches submitted so far take approaches 1 and 2 respectively. Conor
