I read this morning an interesting thing : http://docs.codehaus.org/display/MAVEN/Barriers+to+Building+Eclipse+with+Maven
It might be interesting to take lessons from that. For example, the ivy architecture should support different dependency files than ivy.xml and pom.xml. A requirements I have seen a few times is the dependency with the JDK. Currently, I don't think you can express that in ivy. Other points are also interesting. I let you read. Gilles
