http://www.javaranch.com/journal/200603/AntPart1.html is a good article about some advanced techniques.

Visualizing Data: Self-Documenting Ant files is a good page to start this brand new page with.

I like the idea of having a help task like this:

Figure 7. Help Target Output: After you instrument the code with a "help" target, launching Ant with no arguments gives you the same result as using the "-projecthelp" argument.

If made the default task, it will really run ant -p -f so kind of self-documenting.

Update: http://www.javaforge.com/proj/doc.do?doc_id=53942 is the latest release of Luntbuild. Just download the installer jar: http://www.javaforge.com/displayDocument/luntbuild-1.6.0-installer.jar?d... and then run it via:
java -jar java -jar /luntbuild-1.6.0-installer.jar
If you develop software, you should use Luntbuild. It has more features then most other open source building tools.

http://luntbuild.javaforge.com/ is the main page. It is not the most reliable site, being a sourceforge.net project you can get it here as well: http://sourceforge.net/projects/luntbuild/ .

There is no silver bullet to solving a bad build process. But Luntbuild allows multiple users each with a separate viewing options. So, you can communicate with your customers and bosses about the build and how it is improving.

Changing how it works is done via a web interface to a database back end. So, you aren't changing fragile XML files, you are updating a database.