There are three issues that I am trying to resolve here:
1) Simply to understand what it is intended for and how it works /
behaves, i.e. to satisfy my curiosity. I have looked at the code but
that only shows me how it behaves, which may be different from what was
intended and how it should behave.
From the looks of the code the branch is just a part of the
ModuleRevisionId, can be used in patterns but otherwise nothing really
does anything else with it. The module setting does allow the assignment
of a default branch with a module and it can also be used explicitly in
dependencies.
It seems to me that a conflict manager should check branch as well as
revision when attempting to resolve.
2) In our organisation we are maintaining a number of different
'products' that have various dependencies on each other. Each product
has an architectural aspect as well as an implementation aspect. The
architecture is done in advance of implementation and it may be that due
to business decisions some work that is architected is never
implemented. At any one time there may be multiple pieces of separate
architecture outstanding (not yet approved into main trunk), the same
applies to implementation. Each piece of work is done on its own branch
before being committed to main trunk.
Each aspect of the product is in its own Git repository, and the
implementation is split into open source and professional repositories.
We use a custom build based on top of our own home grown build system
built using Groovy / Ant / Ivy / Java.
So it is a quite complicated structure and we are using Ivy to organize
the created artifacts to provide inter product dependencies.
So if I have A:1.0:master (product A version 1.0 on branch master) that
depends on B:1.1:other and C:2.0:master and B:1.1:other depends on
C:2.0:other then when I build product A I have a conflict between
C:2.0:master and C:2.0:other.
At the moment we encode the branch and version number into the Ivy
revision number so that Ivy detects a conflict but I was looking at
using Ivy branches instead and wanted to know what behavior Ivy would have.
Ideally I would like it so that Ivy would fail if I had the same
revision of an artifact from different branches.
3) We use many javax API specification JARs and need to compile against
them and also make them available to the open source community. We use
open source libraries that depend on different implementation versions
of the same specification version, e.g. geronimo-activation_1.0.2_spec
has according to
http://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.apache.geronimo.specs/geronimo-activation_1.0.2_spec
3 implementation versions 1.0, 1.1 and 1.2. They also can depend on
different specification versions, e.g. geronimo-activation_1.1_spec.
Geronimo as they are using Maven encode the specification version in the
artifact id and use the artifact version for the implementation.
Unfortunately, this means that if I transitively depend on both versions
Ivy will treat them as different JARS so they won't be in conflict but
will cause all sorts of problems when attempting to compile against and run.
So what I was thinking was to use the specification version as the Ivy
revision and the implementation version as a branch. This would have the
same rules as above, i.e. fail if I had the same revision of an artifact
from different branches.
Benjamin Damm wrote:
Branching is not a first-class concept in the ivy world, that I know if.
Is there an integration with your revision control that you're trying
out? Here we just don't branch the ivy repository, that seems to be
common because the binary artifacts shouldn't change.
On Tue, 2009-04-07 at 12:12 +0100, Paul Duffin wrote:
I have a couple of questions about branches in Ivy. I have searched high
and low for any information on it but cannot find it either on mailing
lists or on internet in general. Searching for "ivy branch" brings up a
lot of gardening references.
Apologies if I have missed something obvious, or am just being stupid
but I can't get my head around this at the moment so would appreciate
any help you could give.
What is the purpose of branches in Ivy? I presume they are related to
branches in version control systems but cannot find a concrete example
of how or why you would use them.
How do they affect conflict resolution? e.g. say thanks to transitive
dependencies I have two modules, com.acme#dynamite;1.0 on branch1 and
com.acme#dynamite;1.0 on branch2 is that a conflict? I presume that it
is. If so how is it resolved, in favour of branch1, branch2 or neither
it just fails.
