Sometimes the source of the problem (which
usually manifests itself as being unable to locate an artifact that is quite
clearly there) is a problem with how ivy was configured, and
sometimes it could
be a user error (e.g. making the ivy-cache read only) but invariably the
debugging of the problem takes much longer and consumes more development time
than it ought to.
I remember having had a similar problem (a long time ago) and solved
this by implementing an Ant "mayday" target: it deletes the ivy-cache,
the libraries (under the project's lib directory), the classes (under
build or target directory), the local servers... and leaves the
development environment with just the source code.
Usually, when anything funny happens, the very first answer is always
'ant mayday'.
Since the problems are usually user related (and not primarily ivy
related), I found this a good way to avoid wasting time debugging
something that rarely happens.
hth
-Vladimir
