Ant is completely broken when xerces is installed in Karmic.

Binary package hint: ant

On two different machines (home and work) I upgraded from Jaunty to Karmic, and the ant build tool started reporting this error:

---------------------
rosejn@leaf:~/projects/overtone$ ant
Buildfile: build.xml

BUILD FAILED
/home/rosejn/projects/overtone/build.xml:1: Unexpected element "{}HTML" {antlib:org.apache.tools.ant}HTML

Total time: 0 seconds
------------------

No matter which project I try to run it with, I get this error. If I clear my CLASSPATH environment variable then it works. I narrowed the problem down to the libxerces2-java package, so after doing this:

sudo rm /usr/share/java/xercesImpl*

I can correctly run ant again. Xerces is no longer necessary with recent JVMs anyway, so it should be taken out of the dependency tree for new versions of ant.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
Date: Tue Dec 1 15:30:41 2009
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
NonfreeKernelModules: fglrx
Package: ant 1.7.1-4
PackageArchitecture: all
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.31-15.50-generic
SourcePackage: ant
Uname: Linux 2.6.31-15-generic i686