Convention for laying out an ANT build script

[Andrew Zeon <An...@hothouse.com.au>]

Hi,

I'm new to ANT. One thing I find difficult about ANT is tracing an ANT build
script. Our company has a very long (500 lines) ANT script for build and
deploy. However, whenever I need to trace through it to modify it, or debug
it, I find myself jumping all over the build file because of dependencies.
For this reason, using ANTCALL seemed like a better alternative. However, I
have faced many problems using ANTCALL (particularly with properties). For
some reason, properties declared in my init target are not accessed by
targets called by ANTCALL unless the called target depends on the init
target. 

What is the common convention for laying out an ANT build script? Build
scripts can get awfully long... Is it a good or bad idea to have multiple
ANT scripts so that files are smaller hence easier to manage?

Thanks.