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Although you give the option of running Ant in the background, it is presumably run in a separate thread, and not a separate process. We feel that Ant should be spawned in its own process for the following reason: If you have a complex multithreaded Java application, a rather standard unit test is to assert that all threads spawned by the application are gone at shutdown. This test will always fail with Eclipse currently, because the Eclipse thread is always remaining and hence the blanket test for alive threads fails. The reason why we feel this is a bug (and not a feature), is that ideally Ant should behave in exactly the same manner and produce the same results whether it is run from the command line or launched from Eclipse. This is not about being able to say "fork=yes" in the Ant build file... this is merely the principle that Ant should behave in the same way whether run from Eclipse or not.
This is a duplicate of bug 24129. The reason Eclipse Ant integration is executed in the same VM is to allow the build / tasks / types to have access to the Eclipse "environment". We realize that not all users want or need this integration. Note that it is possible to execute Ant from Eclipse in a separate VM. You can create a external tools launch configuration that starts java much like the ant.bat file from the commandline: java.exe -classpath yourClasspath "-Dant.home=pathToYourAntHome org.apache.tools.ant.Main -buildfile yourBuildFile.xml I will attempt to create and attach a "generic" .launch file that can be used in this way (later today or over the weekend).
Example launch config added to bug 24129 (and bug 30353). *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 24129 ***
