I've been reviewing both Ivy and Maven features related to dependency
management.
Maven has a dependency management section. In this section, dependencies with
rules (e.g. exclusions) can be setup. This information can then be referenced
by child POMs by only including org#module as a dependency. The revision and
rules for that dependency are inherited from the parent. Since Maven 2.0.9,
the
import scope was introduced to allow dependency management information to be
referenced from any POM, not just the parent.
In Ivy 2.1, I use a development time ivysettings.xml file in my stream and
declare revision information there. This allows all projects under development
in that stream to have consistent revisions. For example:
ivysettings.xml
junit.rev=4.8.2
ivy.xml
<dependency org="junit" name="junit" rev="${junit.rev}" />
This works nicely. Unfortunately it doesn't match Maven import or POM
inheritance because I don't inherit dependency rules
(excludes/includes/artifacts). Even the inheritance for revision is nice, you
only need to configure org#module in the child.
Ivy 2.2 introduces parent Ivy files with extends tag. If I understand
correctly, the child files inherits all dependencies. Considering 1 parent
file
in the stream for several modules under development, inheriting all
dependencies
is not what I am interested in. And I don't really want to manage "the UI
layer
parent file" and the "domain layer parent file". I want 1 parent file to
define
the architecture dependencies for all modules in the stream, but let the
children choose which dependencies they use. So I guess I could simply be
asking, can Ivy replicate Maven's import feature?
However, I don't really think Maven's POM Inheritance or import scope is what I
want either. If I understand Maven's parent POM/import feature, the
responsibility for conflict resolution is on the POM author.
I've had this idea for a couple years now regarding multi-module builds, I want
to declare all external module dependencies in a single ivy file, we'll call
that the external-modules-ivy.xml. I then want Ivy to resolve that module.
Because the external-modules-ivy is resolved, special rules
(include/exclude/artifact) are applied and conflicts resolved. So far so good
... all normal Ivy. Then from my child ivy module under development, when I
declare a dependency to an external module I want the dependency branch to be
obtained from a subset of information in the external-modules-ivy report. For
a
visualization, consider a module section in an Ivy Report.html, and now
consider
"importing a resolved module section". All modules under development are
guaranteed to use the same revision of external modules because Ivy performed
conflict resolution before the dependency was introduced. Finally, this could
lead to very optimized resolve processing for modules under development.
I'm very interested to hear the thoughts from this group.
Thanks,
Chris Nokes
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