Wilson, Bruce wrote: > I've seen many example Ant build files that define an <init> target to > define common properties within;
At one stage (what is now known as version 0.3.1 - before the first official Ant release) Ant required such a construction to initialise properties which were not allowed to occur outside of tasks. I think the tomcat buildfiles had this structure and they have been copied a lot. Since they continued to work when properties were allowed, nobody bothered to change them. It is also a fact that many people prefer the regularity of not having operations outside of tasks. The other reason you may have an init task is to do things which remain unsupported outside of tasks. This might include running <mkdir> to create some directory needed by all build targets, setting timestamps, etc. So, the pattern itself, while not necessary for properties is still very much valid. There is some debate going on in ant-dev know about what may or may not be permissible where in future versions of Ant. Conor
