Being able to put a namespace on my imported tasks would be helpful. I am in the process of migrating from ant, and this feature would have helped me. I use the GradleFx plugin which defines a "test" task. So does my ant build. I will be editing my build.xml of course, but it would have been nice to say, "Put all of these tasks into my custom namespace".

You can create your own namespace for these ant tasks by leveraging an intermediate ant build file that references the original ant build file and attaches a namespace to the tasks defined therein.

So, if the original build file is build.xml, create another ant build file called wrapper.xml and define it like the following fragment -

<project default="test">

<include file="build.xml" as="somename"/>

</project>

in the gradle build script instead of referring build.xml, refer wrapper.xml

//ant.importBuild 'build.xml'
ant.importBuild 'wrapper.xml'

All the ant tasks are now available under namespace "somename". A task named 'clean' in build.xml can now be invoked via gradle with names as somename.clean, and build.gradle can have its own version of clean.

gradle clean – clean in build.gradle
gradle somename.clean – clean from the build.xml

This would also be very useful when using multiple plugins. Actually even for simple use-cases like a flex build which publishes to a maven repo, you need maven plugin, which requires Java plugin and gradleFx both defining the basic tasks, like clean, test. I also encountered the migration issue when imported legacy build.xml - it will surely have 'clean' and similar basic tasks names. This feature is a MUST.

Here is another solution without a wrapper XML:

Thanks for the solution Peter.

C:\Users\mahmood\dev\gradle\ant-with-local-buildXml>tree /F /A | findstr "build settings ant"
| build.gradle
| build.xml
| settings.gradle
---ant

C:\Users\mahmood\dev\gradle\ant-with-local-buildXml>type build.gradle

project(':ant') {
ant.importBuild '../build.xml'
}

task hellogradle << {
println 'hello from gradle'
}

task helloant << {
println 'hello from gradle to ant'
}
C:\Users\mahmood\dev\gradle\ant-with-local-buildXml>type settings.gradle
include 'ant'
C:\Users\mahmood\dev\gradle\ant-with-local-buildXml>gradle tasks
:tasks

Other tasks
-----------
helloant
hellogradle

Total time: 3.603 secs
C:\Users\mahmood\dev\gradle\ant-with-local-buildXml>gradle helloant
:helloant
hello from gradle to ant
:ant:helloant
[ant:echo] hello from ant

BUILD SUCCESSFUL

Total time: 3.248 secs
C:\Users\mahmood\dev\gradle\ant-with-local-buildXml>gradle :ant:helloant
:ant:helloant
[ant:echo] hello from ant

BUILD SUCCESSFUL

not sure why, but workaround proposed by @RohitashvaMathur didn't work for me.