build.properties and build.xml

Question

anyone can tell me the ant build (internal) procedure, and how build.properties info is used?

by the way, I am opening a project with build.properties -- but the projects I was working on did not seem to have such a file (newbie question) can someone give me an intro? is that an eclipse generated file?

Answer 1

The build.property can override your properties in your build.xml without having to modify it.

Building with Ant: Introduction states :

The construct is usually used to include a file called build.properties. This is a convention used so that you can override default values for your local build environment, without having to modify build.xml (which may, after all, be a shared file, under version control). This means that build.properties should probably not be under version control (add it to .cvsignore under CVS).

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Resources :

• Evil Ant Build Properties
• Building with Ant: Introduction
• vaanniala - Ant Properties File