Let's say we have a top-level "importing" build file with Ant project name "importing", and an imported build file with Ant project name "imported". Say that both files define target "x". In both native Ant and through Gradle, these two targets/tasks are identified like "x" and "imported.x".

The problem is when an Ant target is imported but not overridden. Say we have target "y" defined only in the "nested" build file. In Ant this target is identified simply as "y". There is no ambiguity since there is no other task definition that it could be confused with, and the end-user has no need to know that it was defined in "imported" as opposed to in "importing". Gradle's "importBuild" messes this up and exposes two tasks for the one Ant target: "y" and "importing.y". The "importing.y" task is not only superfluous, but is misleading because it gives the appearance that the "y" target has been overridden. In Ant you can tell that a target has been overridden precisely because "ant -p" shows both the qualified name like "project.target" (for the nested target) and unqualified "target" (for the overriding target). In gradle there is no way for the end user to distinguish whether an imported target is overridden (in which case there are two targets to choose between) or not (in which case in Gradle there is a superfluous task and is doesn't matter which one is chosen).