[ANN] Release of Ant 1.8.0

[Antoine Levy Lambert]

Hi,

on behalf of the Ant development team, I have the pleasure to announce 
the release of Ant 1.8.0.

Some of the features included in the new release are :

    *  Lexically scoped local properties, i.e. properties that are only 
defined inside a target, sequential block or similar environment.
    * <import> can now import from any file- or URL-providing resource - 
this includes <javaresource>.
    * Various improvements to the directory scanning code that help with 
symbolic link cycles (as can be found on MacOS X Java installations for 
example) and improve scanning performance. For big directory trees the 
improvement is dramatic.
    * The way developers can extend Ant's property expansion algorithm 
has been rewritten (breaking the older API) to be easier to use and be 
more powerful.
    * a new top level element extension-point allows build files to be 
extended with custom targets more easily
    * At the same time the if and unless attributes have been rewritten 
to do the expected thing if applied to a property expansion (i.e. 
if="${foo}" will mean "yes, do it" if ${foo} expands to true, in Ant 
1.7.1 it would mean "no" unless a property named "true" existed). This 
adds "testing conditions" as a new use-case to property expansion.
    * Ant now requires Java 1.4 or later
    * new task include provides an alternative to <import> that should 
be preferred when you don't want to override any targets
    * numerous bug fixes and improvements as documented in Bugzilla and 
in WHATSNEW

Regards,

Antoine Levy-Lambert