Ant 1.8 for Debian ================== All JAR archives in /usr/share/ant/lib/ are appended to the classpath before Ant is run. You can add symlinks there to automatically extend Ant's CLASSPATH. Additional directories to be searched may be added by using the -lib option. The -lib option specifies a search path. Any jars or classes in the directories of the path will be added to Ant's classloader. The order in which jars are added to the classpath is as follows: -lib jars in the order specified by the -lib elements on the command line jars from ${user.home}/.ant/lib (unless -nouserlib is set) jars from ANT_HOME/lib The need libraries for all optional tasks supported by the ant-optional package are suggested during install. They are only suggested as there is only a need to install a specific library if you use a specific optional task. The library dependency for the optional tasks can be found in the manual - which is provided by the ant-doc package. Not all JARs from the original upstream distribution are part of the Debian package because the required libraries to build them have not been packaged yet or are non-free packages. The missing archives are: ant-xalan1 -- you can use ant-xalan2 with libxalan2-java instead ant-xslp ant-icontract ant-netrexx ant-starteam ant-vaj ant-jai ant-weblogic Differences to upstream binary distribution for the build libraries: + ant-junit.jar - lacks Xalan1Executor (use Xalan2Executor)