android ant -pre-compile vs -pre-build

Question

I'm working on an android project where we build our releases with ant. We use the Android-ant target -pre-compile when changing the versionName and some other flags in the code. There is also a -pre-build android-ant target you can use.

Does anyone know the difference between those two targets?

Answer 1

Looking at the build.xml in the SDK's ant tools folder we have:

<target name="-compile" depends="-build-setup, -pre-build, -code-gen, -pre-compile">

Both -pre-compile and -pre-build are empty targets by default and therefore do nothing. The only difference is that -pre-build will run before -code-gen (which is not empty), whilst -pre-compile runs after it.