An addition to my previous message: In practice I believe that ALL targets should be religiously checked to ensure they completed without failing by checking exit values in the case of processes running outside the Ant VM or some other mechanism for processes running inside the VM whether we are aware of a way in which that target can fail or not. If something fails for some reason I want to know about it immediately by having the build fail.
My personal preference is that a "failonerror" attribute should exist for all targets and that it be set to "true" by default. Setting the "failonerror" attribute to "false" would work nicely for the few tasks that are actually optional. Regards, Corey
