Apache Ant/Best Practices/Local File Systems

=Dealing with Local File System Issues=


 * Each developer or user has the right (or is forced by administrators) to put resource such as jar files and libraries in different locations
 * Try to avoid having ANY local file system location dependencies in your build files. Make sure you NEVER put C: in a build file.  This is just plain bad behavior
 * Separate local file system access points in an external "property file"
 * Warning: property files are read by Java tools and are not always path separator aware. You can use "\\" on java, or, knowing that Ant expands existing properties, ${path.separator}
 * Allow people to check out all the files in a project including the build.xml file, customize their local library paths and build
 * Third party projects such as Ivy and Maven2 Ant tasks try to automate the entire library management process. Consider these on a very large/complex project.