Alexander Chernikov - 23 Aug 07 19:06 Actually, some settings of ant file are shared in AntConfiguration component of .ipr file, and some ones are set individually in antWorkspaceConfiguration component of .iws file. E.g. filters, "run in background", tree view / plain view settings are already in .iws. On the other hand, additional properties, additional class path, custom JDK are written in .ipr, and this looks correct! Probably, the request should be: "Do not write anything in .ipr file, if all values of shared properties are default." Plus, it would be nice to get default Ant properties configurable in IDE settings, that is different issue.

Colin Fleming - 23 Aug 07 19:15 Actually, maybe I wasn't quite clear - the problem is that we have a hierarchical build with about 80 modules. Each of these has a separate build file (mostly just stubs that include the common file). The problem is that each developer wants a different selection of build files shown in the Ant tool window, and every time a developer adds or removes a build file the project file is changed and usually conflicts. Dmitry Jemerov commented here that this is an uncommon use case, and that maybe configurations could be optionally shared as with run configurations now. This would be fine, we have two common build files that everyone wants, it's the other 78 that are the problem There's also a related bug detailed in IDEA-14464.