import in ant

Now that the basic <import> has been added, there are few "small" details to settle down - before people start using it.



My opinion is that import should work well for existing build files - that would mean basedir must be relative to the build file ( by default ). It is obviously possible to customize the basedir for the imported.



In any case - if we want different imported files to use different basedirs, we need to keep track of the imported file location in each element. So regardless of the final decision, that's something to work on.



Jose Alberto seems to believe that only files specifically written for import would work - or that the default should support this use case.



In parallel, Alexey Solofnenko posted info about a preprocessor that supports a similar behavior. It's very intersting, but I don't think it'll help us too much - import is going to be a core task.



Properties are as usual a special case. It is possible to rename properties and support a prefix to avoid naming conflicts. This could be done with some special code in PropertyHelper or in the Property task itself - by looking at the current import environment.



The common use case of multiple build files working togheter doesn't seem to benefit from that - you want properties to be consistent, without big surprises. The imutability of properties is already a surprise for many people.