convert bin/nutch to use ant?

[Phillip Rhodes]

I move between XP/Mac/Sun/Linux based upon client or where I am (work 
vs. home) and found ant to be a good cross-platform scripting language.I 
went to run a nutch crawl on my XP box, and the script is not setup to 
run in an XP environment (yes, I could install cygwin)

I have started creating an ant file that I can use to invoke the 
different java programs that come with nutch and found a "job" file, 
never came across a job file before.  I am guessing it a monster jar 
file with all the dependencies inside it.  I don't think that will work 
in ant!

One little trick that I have learned is to put my ant build.xml file 
into my war file WEB-INF directory.  Since a war file represents a 
bundle of your dependencies, your ant file can easily be shipped with 
your war file and provide a nice and easy way to invoke your java main 
programs.

Has anyone created ant files to invoke the various nutch programs?  Can 
I help out doing this?  How would folks feel about a 2nd war file (an 
admin war app)  It would be a skeleton war file at first (not provide 
any functionality) but we would put all the plugins inside the war file 
so that the ant war file can find them and we can run them.  Down the 
road, we can add a web ui to do a crawl, etc...

Thanks.