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It sure did, you use conditions, no need for contrib.

https://ant.apache.org/manual/Tasks/condition.html

The else part is easily done by repeating and negating the condition.

Two other advantages of Ant that MSBuild lacks in a sane way to this day, are macros, and proper documentation.

As of Ant 1.9.1, you can use 'if' and 'unless' attributes on any task or element in a target. I stopped using Ant a long time ago, but this was a pleasant discovery when I had to pick up an old Ant based project recently.

https://ant.apache.org/manual/ifunless.html

Nice, I was basing my answer on what was there initially.

I always liked Ant, as I don't suffer from XML allergy.

I agree, that is what I meant: there were people who installed Contrib to have <if> element, but in reality you did not need that you could just use Ant's built-in features like you said. In my opinion installing Contrib to use <if> was a demonstration of not having understood how Ant works.

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