Yesterday I had to stop Ant build process of Pentaho-kettle which was taking so long; and today it starts all the processes (tests, packaging, ..) from the beginning. Is there any way that I can resume the building process from the point it was stopped? Tests also could not be skipped with the option:
ant dist -Dmaven.test.skip=true
and I didn't find out how to tell ant, not to build the packages if they already exist.
Have you completely a successful build on your machine? You have not indicated which steps are taking a long time.
I notice that the project is using apache ivy to manage its dependencies. The first time a build runs will be the longest since the dependencies must be first downloaded and cached. Subsequent builds should run faster.
As for the setting the "maven.test.skip" that only applies to Maven based builds. Maven is a different build tool.