My take on this is that developers need to be aware of their user’s needs. Ant does not have a GUI. The documentation and the console output *is* the user interface. If that is inadequate, then the product is useless.

It seems to me that ant should know perfectly well the task is defined. I have ant-junit.jar in my ANT_HOME/lib which I believe defines the task. The problem is that ant cannot find the junit libraries that this task depends upon (namely junit.jar). If that means it can’t recognize the task definition, then there is a design flaw in the mechanism. I don’t know much about task definition in ant because welll… I really really really don’t want to know about it. I have more inportant things to worry about like my own software!

I would suggest the ability to define and use a task is a core user-feature of ant, and ant should therefore support the common use-scenarios that surroud that feature. I.e. missing libraries, misconfigured build.xml files etc etc etc. That’s what ant is supposed to do. The core of ant doesn’t actually do much else does it?

“look for a commercial alternative if it doesn’t work the way you want it to.”

The sad fact is that there is no commercial alternative because open-source kills commercial opportunity. Instead, we’re *forced* (yes, FORCED) to use ineptly documented and unsupported crap like ant and maven. There’s no way any company I’ve worked for in the past 10 years would pay for a product when there’s some half baked P.O.S. available that is one of the latest buzz-word technologies.

Ditch ant and use GNU make. Seriously. If you’re stuck on Windows, install Cygwin too. It will save you time.

ps: try the error message in Ant 1.7 -there’s far better diagnostics there.

You say you have deadlines to meet which infers that you are using their tool in a commercial environment and getting paid for your work. How much did you pay for Ant?

Sorry but you get what you pay for in this world and like the previous poster said you have the source code available and you can make the changes.

Open Source is not built around multi national companies with cash to throw at these projects often its done by people in their spare time.

By all means write your comments and put your wish list to Ant but quit your whining and look for a commercial alternative if it doesn’t work the way you want it to.

This is common and has a number of causes; the usual
solutions are to read the manual pages then download and
install needed JAR files, or fix the build file:
– You have misspelt ‘extendclasspath’.
Fix: check your spelling.
– The task needs an external JAR file to execute
and this is not found at the right place in the classpath.
Fix: check the documentation for dependencies.
Fix: declare the task.
– The task is an Ant optional task and the JAR file and/or libraries
implementing the functionality were not found at the time you
yourself built your installation of Ant from the Ant sources.
Fix: Look in the ANT_HOME/lib for the ‘ant-’ JAR corresponding to the
task and make sure it contains more than merely a META-INF/MANIFEST.MF.
If all it contains is the manifest, then rebuild Ant with the needed
libraries present in ${ant.home}/lib/optional/ , or alternatively,
download a pre-built release version from apache.org
– The build file was written for a later version of Ant
Fix: upgrade to at least the latest release version of Ant
– The task is not an Ant core or optional task
and needs to be declared using .
– You are attempting to use a task defined using
or but have spelt wrong or not
defined it at the point of use

Remember that for JAR files to be visible to Ant tasks implemented
in ANT_HOME/lib, the files must be in the same directory or on the
classpath

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