title: Best location for ant build.xml files?
body: <p>For those of you that use Ant with multiple projects, where do you put the build.xml files? Do you put one in each project, or do you put them in a separate project that contains all your Ant-related files?</p>
  
  <p>The usual recommendation is to put a build.xml in each project. But this has a few drawbacks:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li><p>It makes it hard to reuse common targets in multiple projects.</p></li>
  <li><p>Sometimes you want to use Ant to export a project from source control and deploy it. Obviously you can't do this if the build file is in the project itself.</p></li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>But if you put them all in a common location:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li><p>People need to be aware of their location to use them; they can't just use "ant -find" to find the current project's file.</p></li>
  <li><p>You can't have different build instructions for different branches of the project.</p></li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>What do you guys do?</p>
  
  <p><strong>EDIT</strong>: Thanks for the good suggestions so far. As far Maven, these aren't Java projects, and I get the impression that Maven is only meant for Java.</p>