My problems are related to the Ant tasks filter and copy. Here is a
distilled form of the problem:

File build.properties:

  user=smith
  home.dir=/home/${user}
  PROJ=${home.dir}/project

File build.xml (excerpt):

  <target name="mkpar">
     <property file="build.properties" />
     <echo message="home.dir=${home.dir}" />
     <filter filtersfile="build.properties" />
     <copy file="par.xml.template" tofile="par.xml" filtering="true" />
  </target>

File par.xml.template (excerpt):
   <dir>@PROJ@</dir>

Running target mkpar first outputs

  home.dir=/home/smith

but the resulting file par.xml contains

  <dir>${home.dir}/project</dir>

and not, as I would have expected,

  <dir>/home/smith/project</dir>

It is as if the properties would not be substituted properly when
the property file is used as a filter.

Is this a bug in Ant or a feature? Can someone suggest an easy workaround?

Ronald