Why use antrun and not the Ant program itself?

Maven has certain benefits over Ant. And for your Ant projects to take advantage of these, you can use Maven as your project management tool and use its maven-antrun-plugin to build your Ant projects.

Furthermore, if you wish to migrate from Ant to Maven, you can use this plugin first, then gradually convert your Ant expressions into their corresponding Maven expressions.

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Why is antrun not correctly handling my plugin dependency in a multi-module build?

There is a problem in some versions of Maven (earlier than 3.0-alpha-1) that prevent Maven from correctly resolving plugin dependencies in a multi-module build (MNG-1323). This means that if you have multiple modules in your project and the antrun plugin declares a different set of dependencies, only the first declaration found will be used.

The workaround for this is to specify the same set of plugin dependencies for all declarations of the antrun plugin. Another option is to move the plugin dependencies to the project level and set the scope to "provided". For more information, see MANTRUN-51 and MANTRUN-106.

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