Erik Hatcher keeps us up to date about what’s going on with Ant 1.6:
Ant 1.6 is trundling along, nobody is in a rush to ship anything, as Ant 1.5.x is good for most people’s needs. You can get on the developer mail list if you want to take part in the next generation of Ant.
Ant 1.6 will be different internally from Ant 1.5. It has reworked its classloading, parses big build files faster, and, by popular vote, will only run on Java1.2 or later. Supporting Java 1.1 was getting too painful: it was time to move on. You can still build Java 1.1 code using
<javac target="1.1">and setting up the classpaths to point at the appropriate runtime. Same for<java>; you can run on 1.1 by requesting a different JVM and pointing to the other version of Java 1.1.Ant1.6 in CVS has some experimental new features for big projects, an
<import>task to import build file fragments from other files, the nice feature being you can now use Ant properties to select the files to import. While<subant>is lining up to be a bulk means of calling a target in sub-project – imagineantwith fileset support.