My gripes about ant (Score 2, Insightful)

1. The pulling teeth part! You need to use the 3rd party ant-contrib package to even get basic if-else and for loop functionality. And even then, since it's XML, you end up with crap like this:

<if>
<equals arg1="${foo}" arg2="bar"/>
<then>
<property name="bat" value="barf"/>
</then>
</if>

... give me a break.

What I'm always hoping for is a build system that is just a perl / python library, so I can write the build script in a real language and call the build system when I want to.

2. Ant's simplistic rebuild-on-file-mod way of doing things misses things. Say class A.java calls class B.java. You build and all is well. Then you change B.java's interface, but not where it is called in A.java. By right your build should break now, but ant only rebuilds B.java, because it's file mod time is updated; it does no analysis of what depends on it and should be rebuilt. So you run the program and if that line of code gets called you get a NoSuchMethodError, examine that stack trace, and manually delete the .class file or somesuch. What ant needs is something like what gcc -M does for make.

... hey, I use it, but it's the year 2005 for crying out loud.