> I thought the main reason was you got to use Ant's nifty filtering on all
> the sources during the copy to the build tree, so that any version info or
> config info was only stored in the build.xml, and not anywhere in the
> source (or doc, or ...).
We had being doing a copy of our source tree for precisely this reason, and for the reasons you cite:
> takes longer, takes up more disk
> space, and introduces more risk in the build process
have begun to move away from it.
The inline regular _expression_ replacement task I submitted a while back (see http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=ant-dev&m=97864954216682&w=2) makes this a lot easier. It can, for example, run through all of your checked-out files and update the version number/build timestamp (see the example in the archives). This is especially useful when your version control system doesn't do things like this directly, or when you want to do things like conditional compilation.
The other advantage of doing this "inline" rather than using "filter token replacement" is that the source is compilable without filtering.
- rlw
