There's no discovery without that xmlns declaration, so ant boot times arent hit by a need to scan every JAR on the classpath.
That's one reason, and a very valid one IMHO. Another is to have things stay explicit in Ant as much as possible. I dispute your point that auto-discovering of tasks is good for non-developers end users. My own experience is that less Ant-savvy users don't know where the non-core tasks are coming from, so can't find out the documentation for them (when there's doc ;-). I've very much a proponent of using the AntLibs auto-magic antlib:<package-name> Namespace URI, because it still forces an explicit reference to access the tasks, which help in identifying these tasks' origin, while being simple and short enough. If auto-loading is ever implemented in Ant, I would want it to be OFF by default, and be turned ON either by a command line switch or an attribute in the top-level <project> element of the build file. --DD --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
