build.properties and build.xml

anyone can tell me the ant build (internal) pr开发者_StackOverflowocedure, and how build.properties info is used?

by the way, I am opening a project with build.properties -- but the projects I was working on did not seem to have such a file (newbie question) can someone give me an intro? is that an eclipse generated file?

The build.property can override your properties in your build.xml without having to modify it.

Building with Ant: Introduction states :

The construct is usually used to include a file called build.properties. This is a convention used so that you can override default values for your local build environment, without having to modify build.xml (which may, after all, be a shared file, under version control). This means that build.properties should probably not be under version control (add it to .cvsignore under CVS).

Resources :

• Evil Ant Build Properties
• Building with Ant: Introduction
• vaanniala - Ant Properties File