I have spent the entire weekend trying to make ivy work for me and ivy seems to be fundamentally opposed to what I want to do. A quick background:
- I have 5 different projects, with a varying level of dependencies (A,B dep on C; B,C dep on D, all dep on E). - I have 3 different builds going with our CI server: trunk, QA branch, PROD branch - At any time a developer can run one of these 3 active branches (or all three) - I want to publish each artifact with up to 3 versions: trunk, qa, prod. No number scheme desired. Example: A-trunk.jar A-qa.jar A-prod.jar, B-trunk.jar B-qa.jar B-prod.jar, etc. - I want the dependent projects to get the last built artifact that was published. I went through the tutorials, and played with the example projects, and I cannot get this to work. Basically the problem is that IVY seems to be numeric version dependent, and will not retrieve the same version even though a new artifact has been published. Once the dependent artifact has been resolved and retrieved, it is cached and will never be overwritten unless the version changes. Therefore the users of that artifact will never get the latest instance. I know the sample projects solve this by adding a unique build number, or a timestamp based version, but this causes a tremendous amount of stale artifacts to lie around. Plus when resolved, it does not automatically clean up older versions that were retrieved, so I would need to put clean up tasks in all of my build files. This is evident in the depender/dependee example. With every build/publish of dependee (say 3 times), depender will copy the latest dependee-n.jar into its lib directory without cleaning up the old ones. So it is left with the following in the lib dir: $ cd /opt/apache-ivy-2.2.0/src/example/dependence/depender/lib $ ls -l -rw-r--r-- 1 jsokel staff 169763 Nov 22 2005 commons-lang-2.0.jar -rw-r--r-- 1 jsokel staff 1511 Jan 22 16:02 dependee-1.jar -rw-r--r-- 1 jsokel staff 1511 Jan 22 16:06 dependee-2.jar -rw-r--r-- 1 jsokel staff 1511 Jan 22 16:07 dependee-3.jar So for me: - Old artifacts are completely irrelevant - We build many times per day so I dont want all the old jars/wars piling up in the local repo or the resolved lib dir - I dont want to perform all these cleanup tasks (especially since I dont necessarily know the past version numbers) - I want resolve/retrieve to just get the latest instance if the publish time changed. Is this possible? Various settings seem to imply this is possible, but in all of my testing I could not get the cache to update without a version number change. I was about to change it to write directly into the cache, rather than the local directory, but it seemed wrong since I was now making the updates for ivy. Thanks in advance for any help, John
