[Anthill-pro] Anthill Pro best practices?

[Chad Loder]

Hello.

I will be implementing a continuous build and integration system for a large scale Java
product using Anthill Pro.  I have built a proof-of-concept system using AHP and I will
be scrapping this and redoing things from scratch now that I have learned some of the
quirks of AHP and its capabilities.

I would like to ask the list for recommendations on best practices and pitfalls to
avoid (I suppose these are called anti-patterns these days). Is there a collection
of best practices already compiled? I could not find one.

Specifically I would love to hear recommendations on:

* The optimal level of granularity for defining workflows and the production of
  intermediate artifacts from each workflow (feeding artifacts from one workflow
  to the next).

* Approaches to tagging and promoting builds through the various stages

* Adaptation of an existing multi-platform build system (using Ant on both Linux
  and Windows+Cygwin) that depends on a large number of environment variables and
  external tools, including not only the JDK but also a toolchain for native
  libraries (either gcc or Microsoft Visual Studio).

  Much of the toolchain bootstrapping is done via Ant but there are still many
  areas that must be configured manually (the native compilers and SDKs must
  be installed of course). Can you share experiences on multi-platform build systems
  using multiple agents on a complex project?

Thanks,
   Chad Loder