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To: ant-user@jakarta.apache.org
Subject: Re: why can references only be defined at the target level?
References: <6DDA62170439D31185750000F80826AC0439B00B@zmerd004.ca.nortel.com>
From: Stefan Bodewig <bodewig@bost.de>
Date: 02 Nov 2000 09:25:47 +0100
In-Reply-To: "Jay Glanville"'s message of "Tue, 31 Oct 2000 12:24:40 -0600"
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>>>>> "JG" == Jay Glanville <dickon@nortelnetworks.com> writes:

 JG> Boy, when your subject line says it all ...

So I have less to quote 8-)

Basically the concept of references in Ant is supposed to be used just
like the one in XML. Each element in XML can have an attribute of the
ID type (this attribute has the name id in Ant build files) which has
one special property, it has to be unique in the document. 

So if references have to be unique - viewed from the document, not the
way Ant parses the document - they are global in scope by
definition. Putting them into targets would make them look something
different (just like putting <property> tags into targets led to very
counterintuitive situations in Ant 1.1).

Stefan