Ant <property> task: is there a difference between 'value' and 'location'?

Question

When setting a property to refer to a filepath, is there a difference between using the value or location parameters?

The documentation at https://ant.apache.org/manual/Tasks/property.html states that:

value sets the value of the property

location sets the property to the absolute filename of the given file.

So is value for general values, and location just for filepaths?

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In a real life example, is there a difference between these two lines of code? If so, what actual impact does it have?

    <property name="cobertura.dir" value="C:/Cobertura/cobertura-1.9" />
    <property name="cobertura.dir" location="C:/Cobertura/cobertura-1.9" />

Answer 1

It is documented in the ANT manual you have already referred...

location : Sets the property to the absolute filename of the given file. 
If the value of this attribute is an absolute path, it is left unchanged (with / and \ characters converted to the current platforms conventions). 
Otherwise it is taken as a path relative to the project's basedir and expanded.

So you have the option of specifying an absolute/ relative path.

So location is used if you want to do relative paths. Either location or value (mutually exclusive) can be used if you're doing absolute paths

Answer 2

In case it helps anyone else:

At http://www.javapractices.com/topic/TopicAction.do?Id=135 , the writer recommends:

For properties that represent a file or directory, use the 'location' attribute, not 'value'

.properties files equate to using <property name='x' value='y'> since the 'location' attribute isn't used. This isn't recommended for files and directories, since this will not resolve relative references. If you do specify a location in a properties file, then it should be absolute, not relative. In addition, you'll need to escape backslashes.