Peter (Donald), Apologies, but your tone is quite often abusive. People who post thoughtful comments ought not to be insulted just because you disagree with them. Now, to continue this thread with some responses to your objections, as I have seen them: Objection #1: Adding flow-of-control tasks makes Ant more complex for the user. Response #1: Adding more tasks -- any tasks -- increases the complexity of the tool, in a trivial sense: there are more tasks to choose from, and so choosing the appropriate task to use requires reading more documentation. Adding if/then, switch, foreach, etc. tasks or constructs will, in this trivial sense, increase the complexity of the tool. However, people are not required to use each and every task provided with Ant. I myself use only about 14 Ant tasks -- , , , , , , , , , , , , , and