what you are trying to do sounds like a continuous integration kind of scenario..from my experience, build.xml is in the project and when you checkin, the build server checks for a new checkin and builds the project using the steps in build.xml and checks in a tag with a version number if the build succeeds. I haven't done it in Linux/unix environment but I have done it using build.xml, MSBuild, Powershell and Hudson/CC.Net.