Crash in Ant was persistent due to not-cleaned cache directories

We just worked through a frustrating crash inside of Ant that occurred while building a makefile-based project. After much cleaning, deleting and re-installing it turned out that the bad state was hiding in either the /gen or /bin directories of a Java library we were compiling along with our main project. Manually deleting those directories fixed the problem. Below is the Ant crash traceback in case anyone else runs into the same problem.

1> BUILD FAILED
1> C:\NVPack\android-sdk-windows\tools\ant\build.xml:595: The following error occurred while executing this line:
1> C:\NVPack\android-sdk-windows\tools\ant\build.xml:642: java.lang.ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException: 1
1> at com.android.ant.DependencyGraph.parseDependencyFile(DependencyGraph.java:180)
1> at com.android.ant.DependencyGraph.(DependencyGraph.java:54)
1> at com.android.ant.SingleDependencyTask.initDependencies(SingleDependencyTask.java:87)
1> at com.android.ant.ManifestMergerTask.execute(ManifestMergerTask.java:108)
1> at org.apache.tools.ant.UnknownElement.execute(UnknownElement.java:291)
1> at sun.reflect.GeneratedMethodAccessor4.invoke(Unknown Source)
etc…

Hi Corysama,
Could you give a small samples for us to reproduce it?

1> at com.android.ant.ManifestMergerTask.execute(ManifestMergerTask.java:108)

Is this a custom build task? We don’t do any manifest merging.

Cheers!