One of the nice things about Ivy is that it works with your current build mechanism. You don't have to redo everything from scratch. I see the power of Maven. However, converting 100 Ant projects into Maven instead of using Ivy is asking for trouble.
The main issue is that there doesn't seem to be a C share object repository that Java has. Changing to Maven or Gradle wouldn't solve that problem, yet it also means completely rewriting your whole build mechanism. There is either a C/C++ tool that provides access to a worldwide C share object repository, or there isn't. I don't know how Java as a language compares to C/C++. I know many C-Heads who turn up their noses at the very mention of Java (It's not a real language unless you can accidentally overwrite a buffer!). However Java is way ahead on build tools, and programming environment. Continuous Integration is practically non-existent in C-World. How can it be when it can take hours and dozens of systems to build an application? The C++ IDE world has no equivalent to Eclipse (unless you count Eclipse). And, the concept of dependency management doesn't seem to exist. The best I can imagine is using a combination of Ant and Ivy to download via <ivy:retrieve> the shared objects from a munged Nexus/Artifactory server, and tying the whole build process together with Makefiles. I've seen it work although it seems a bit Rube Goldbergish. (This causes the bird to peck, turning on the fan, causing the sailboat to float away, and starting the download of the required C Library from the Nexus Repo…). After all, the main thing about Maven and Ivy is transitive dependencies. Is there a Makefile to pom.xml/ivy.xml mechanism? It's been a while since I've worked in the C/C++ world. Maybe there is some native tool that can do what Ivy and Maven does. If there is, use that. There's a certain power with standards, even if you don't fully agree with them. -- David Weintraub da...@weintraub.name On Dec 7, 2012, at 1:59 AM, Marcel Overdijk <marceloverd...@gmail.com> wrote: > As we are also looking for alternatives that are a better fit, we are also > considering Gradle. > Gradle also has an experimental C++ plugin: > http://gradle.org/docs/current/userguide/cpp.html > Something like this in theory it would mean you can use Gradle for both > dependency resolving and building. > > I also found a couple of Maven plugins for C/C++ which might also be > interesting: > http://mojo.codehaus.org/maven-native/native-maven-plugin/usage.html > http://java.freehep.org/freehep-nar-plugin/narDependencies.html
