This reminds me of this "best practice" that uses a single maven profile to run an ant task:
http://ionixx.wordpress.com/2008/03/10/running-specified-ant-tasks-within-maven2-outside-the-lifecycle/ Basically, you can run an ant target from maven like this: mvn -Pant -Dtarget=my-target. This is better than using ant alone, because it lets maven construct an appropriate classpath which the ant target can use. So, maven tasks were not designed to be like ant targets, but can be used like them, if you're using ant targets as standalone scripts outside of the build lifecycle. -Alex
