Why are we packaging Ant ?

Hi,

Perhaps a long overdue stupid question time, but why are we spending lots of effort altering 
Ant installations , altering bash files and bat scripts, altering jar files etc. Lots of pain 
in making it compatible with multiple windows versions etc….

Looking at http://svn.apache.org/viewvc?view=revision&revision=700693 <http://svn.apache.org/viewvc?view=revision&revision=700693>  and I’ve checked 
the other revisions noted in upgrading Ant etc.

But, before embarking on a mission, thought I would ask the simple question, why are we 
packaging Ant? Why not let developers install a (compatible) version of Ant themselves ?

Would be an awful lot easier for us to not have to maintain and upgrade a packaged Ant, and
especially at release time. 

But I guess Im missing something obvious as to why this needs to be.

In reference to:

https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FOR-1246 <https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FOR-1246> 

Thanks

Gav…