Problems with using .ant.properties file

[Paul Philion <ph...@acmerocket.com>]

Greetings -

I'm playing around with Ant (I finally have some time) and I've come across
a little bug:

There seem to be some problems setting properties in the ~/.ant.properties
file.

Looking at the code, this would seem to be a problem using *any* external
properties file, due to the way that Property.addProperties() is written.

addProperties() checks if the property is null before setting it. So you
can't override a property that is already set.

Is this the intended behavior? If so, what the point of including the
~/.ant.properties in the build.xml file? Specifically, I'm trying to
override the build.compiler property to be "jikes".

Also, what is the significance of normal properties verses "user
properties". There is a bit of code that checks it, but the flag is only set
once (in Ant.java) and it doesn't smell very good.

- Paul Philion