Doug Cutting wrote:
Ivy adds a feature to Ant while Maven replaces Ant. If folks are happy with Ant, and seek just to add dependency management, then Ivy's a good choice.
People may think I'm biased to Ant, but the reality is that both tools are good, and dependency management is great when it works, bad when it doesnt. I like the appeal of Maven "less fiddling with build.xml files" but dislike the harsh reality "dependency graph hell, no flexibility in your build/test process, as you have to follow their assumptions". Ant gives you flexibility at the price of entry and maintenance costs.
There's no reason why the core can't add Ivy to Ant, while related projects can use either ant+ivy or maven2 for its own builds and tests: choice of build tool should not be transitive. For that we need to start pushing out the relevant artifacts core, core-test, etc, to the central repository, with POM files that everyone is happy with. There is an open bug on that; it would help if someone wishing to use Maven had a look at the poms and warned of trouble before they actually went up into the central repository.
-steve
