Ant Developer’s Handbook

Semantic Errors

Most semantic errors are the result of misinterpreting or miscoding a problem. Configuration management of a build is typically a well-understood process. Another source of semantic errors is a result of improper flow through control structures such as if and while constructs. But Ant does not have any of these constructs. Flow control is pretty much limited to the if, unless, and depends attributes of the target element. These simple structures offer just enough to control the flow through most build processes and not much more. Thus, one of the beauties of Ant is that you won’t run into many semantic errors unless your build script is extremely large and unwieldy. If this is the case, you should consider refactoring the build ...