> -----Original Message----- > From: Sebastian Krysmanski [mailto:[email protected]] > Sent: Thursday, September 10, 2009 7:55 AM > To: [email protected] > Subject: Is there a real(!) advantage of Ivy over placing the depends > in the VCS > > Hello, > > recently someone recommended Ivy to me because he saw that we were > hosting > our project dependencies in our Subversion repository. I took this > opportunity to have a look at Ivy and on first glance Ivy seemed very > nice. > However I see a major disadvantage over dependencies in a VCS > repository: If > a project is dormant for a longer period of time an artifact (i.e. a > library) may longer be available (in a certain, required version or the > repository may not exist anymore). > > If we were using Ivy this would result in the project no longer being > able > to be built.
Why do you think that using Ivy might cause the required version not to exist anymore? Ivy has no explicit or implicit behavior for deleting artifacts from the repository (cache yes, but not repository). > How does Ivy "address" this drawback? Is > there any commonly used solution to solve this problem? Ivy doesn't really address it, because Ivy isn't a repository manager. I do agree with the concern that in Ivy (or Maven, for that matter), where anyone could manipulate or remove the artifacts without an audit trail. Your process and procedures ideally take care of this, but IMO it's a lot to leave to chance. A practice I'd like to try is to use filesystem only for temporary artifacts, and IvySvn to store "permanent" artifacts. Another concern for me is the overhead of maintaining stable third-party artifacts in a metadata-indexed repository. I have found that 99% of the time, I don't require transitive resolution or different configurations for things like log4j. As long as its version number is stored in the manifest, then there's really no benefit in storing those things separate from the source code, and it adds a penalty of resolving/downloading something that could just remain tightly coupled to source. HTH, Carlton ***CONFIDENTIALITY NOTICE and DISCLAIMER*** This message and any attachment are confidential and may be privileged or otherwise protected from disclosure and solely for the use of the person(s) or entity to whom it is intended. If you have received this message in error and are not the intended recipient, please notify the sender immediately and delete this message and any attachment from your system. If you are not the intended recipient, be advised that any use of this message is prohibited and may be unlawful, and you must not copy this message or attachment or disclose the contents to any other person.
