It Rains In Triplicate

So I have a growing java project that I’m splitting into a general library and an application, in different build and project spaces. Both of which have multiple modules, directories, etc.

So, traditionally, I’ve written an ant script that would work like:

directory structure is

root

root/a

root/b

root/build.xml would use antcall to call root/a/build.xml and root/b/build.xml, both of which would use the majority of the variable space of root/build.xml

However, ant now can do reasonable includes. So I could do:

root/build.xml as the dispatcher

root/config.xml as the variables

root/[a|b]/build.xml is called by build.xml and includes config.xml

Is that better than the old regime of pushing the variables from the dispatcher build file? It may give a little more control for shared variables.