Hi,
I have migrated our ant build system to phing since it seems to have matured quite a bit!
The first major issue was no xmlproperties as a core task:
http://ant.apache.org/manual/CoreTasks/xmlproperty.html
Attached is a patch (tested on windows - no semanticAttributes). I made some other 'fixes' along the way, through I've only had a quick look through the code.
i.e. The TarTask.php and ZipTask.php both extend FileSet and copy getFiles(), but it seems like it should belong in FileSet (very useful - many use cases).
I needed this for a complicated task that calls FileSet.
After applying patch:
xmlproperty=phing.tasks.system.XmlPropertyTask
Enjoy! Happying phinging