Ant build fails inside Eclipse

Question

For years, I've used the Ant integration for Eclipse to build my Android projects as outlined by Google on this documentation page. It's my favorite way of building release builds, because I can simply hit "Run external tool" in Eclipse to start the Ant build, and it runs in the background.

Since recently (I believe ADT 22.0 or 22.1), I've been getting the following failure:

[echo] Handling Resources...
[aapt] Generating resource IDs...
[aapt] invalid resource directory name: C:\path\to\project\bin\res/crunch

BUILD FAILED
C:\Android\android-sdk\tools\ant\build.xml:653: The following error occurred while executing this line:
C:\Android\android-sdk\tools\ant\build.xml:698: null returned: 1

I'm not sure what the cause of this is, since AAPT seems to generate the "crunch" directory itself. I've tried cleaning my project and disabling automatic building in Eclipse but to no avail.

I also tried executing ant release outside of Eclipse, but this gives the same error. Executing ant clean release doesn't work either, as it attempts to delete jars that are still in use by Eclipse. Therefore, the only solution that I've found to work at all is:

1. Exit Eclipse
2. Wait for the process to end
3. Execute ant clean release

This is excruciating because as we know, restarting Eclipse is a royal pain. Furthermore, all affected projects need to be cleaned which makes the entire process take up to half an hour. I've opened issue #60496 on b.android.com, but haven't heard any official response.

Is there any solution to this aside from biting the bullet and switching to Android Studio?

Answer 1

The answer is here:

http://pissedoff-techie.blogspot.in/2014/07/android-build-fails-with-ant-on-eclipse.html

1. Disable autobuild.
2. delete crunch folder.
3. run ant script.
4. re enable auto build.

Answer 2

Also from https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=60496, I just deleted gen/* and bin/* in the project and it's referencing library. It worked.