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The project mechanism in netbeans has very poor support for "existing source with ant build" in it. It really should always generate all of the build environment for a new application of a selected type (JEE vs JSE etc). It should make the project's new, generated build.xml override all the behavior to drive targets from the provided build script, which should be any file name/type the user wants. I name my build.xml files build.ant instead so that I can define a windows file type mapping to invoke ant when I double click that file. It shu The 'existing source with build' setup should inspect my specified ant build file and ask which "path" is the classpath to use. It should also ask what the "build directory" is and otherwise try and integrate all of netbeans build environment into building where my ant script builds to. This would allow projects to roll over to the netbeans build environment by just removing target overrides and otherwise augmenting the standard build with the private actions needed. As it is now, it is difficult (almost impossible for many people I'd guess) to get "compile single" and "run single" and "debugging" to work in netbeans which makes it feel like not much of an initial solution.
Currently for 6.5 there are two approaches: 1) Project with custom build script (AKA freeform) - yes, this one has limited feature set and setup is quite complicated. But can be used you have really complicated build script and you intend to use ide mostly like and editor. 2) project with custom sources - you just point ide to your sources and IDE generates build script four you. After 6.5 is planned full support of Maven project, as well as "automatic projects" http://wiki.netbeans.org/AutomaticProjects (you can try them in 6.5, but be aware that it's still under development) which should solve lot of problems you mentioned. Closing as worksforme, since this area is really being worked on after 6.5, stay tuned! Thanks for report anyway!
I still think that there is a not so clear view of what developers really need wrapped up in this argument. If I have an ANT build, already in place, because there is some automated build system in place for my project, but I want to use the netbeans IDE, and that build script really doesn't do much more than compile from the development perspective (it might have a nightly test target, a check out and increment version from the SCM target etc), I am confused as to why netbeans developers don't think that they can support the use of the IDE functions in that environment. Sure, I can create a project directory, someplace else, and create a project with existing sources. But then, if the classpath changes in the project, I have to keep manually adjusting the libraries in netbeans. I really want a team of people to see one view of how to manage the project with ANT. And it's really sad, for me, that the netbeans developers are not interested in dealing with the reality that not everyone can, or should do things their way. I think it would be interesting to track down how many free form projects are active in the community to see if it's just me, or if others are suffering too. Somehow, the short comings of free form projects became visible enough to cause web pages to be created with information on how to supplement the generated XML with the additional XML needed for compile-single and run-single. With regard to your second point, automatic project doesn't seem to consider path extracting from an existing XML build. That, for me, is the most helpful mechanisms that netbeans should provide. Regarding Maven, its not clear to me how that will help me take an existing, building java project based on ANT, and import it into netbeans.
There are basically two types of people who are coming to use netbeans. Those new to Java development, and those with experience in Java development looking to use some features of netbeans to ease the development of a project. It's these experienced developers that need to have more help with the importing of projects into netbeans. Free form projects really need to be reconsidered in how they are implemented today. Any project brought into netbeans should get a complete ant build created for it which is the same as done for standard projects. These existing projects should be analyzed for use of specific classes to identify JEE vs JSE vs JME etc. Then, the project administration UI should have a mechanism to replace "build", "clean" and other standard targets, which netbeans uses, with calls to the users targets in a selected ant file as overrides of that behavior. This would allow maven or any other type of activity to drive these targets while still allow netbeans to administrate the tasks available and how and when they are called from the IDE. In this way, the user would be able to start out with everything netbeans has to offer, no matter what type of experience or project they have, yet customize it to work with the things that they require to be done differently. Today, the user gets nothing, and has to rewire the IDEs ANT usage, by hand, and this is not usually a fun experience.
Change of default owner.
This old bug may not be relevant anymore. If you can still reproduce it in 8.2 development builds please reopen this issue. Thanks for your cooperation, NetBeans IDE 8.2 Release Boss