...Things like ANT should be installed like the tool that it is...
I see your point, but IMHO the big advantage with including ANT is that the only requirement on the users is to install a JDK.
As we're currently distributing Cocoon in source code, requiring users to install the correct version of ant would certainly increase the traffic on the users list with al sorts of mysterious problems, duplicate ant setups where you get the wrong version in the path, etc.
In projects where I'm working we do it slightly differently, we have a parallel CVS module for tools, shared between projects, with directory names including version numbers, and the build.sh script accesses the appropriate version of the tool with relative paths like
../cvs-tools-sandbox/ant/1.5.1
With avoids heavy duplication of tools yet allows each project to use the "right" version of a tool.
-Bertrand
