I'm continuing to look at the large multi-module Ant build I work with, to see if I could clean this up a bit by integrating Ivy.
I'm not just looking at how to clean up the build, but to make it easier for developers to work with checked-out projects in Eclipse. Besides the somewhat haphazard way we reference simple third-party and internal artifacts (all of which I see how I can Ivy-ize), we also use two large frameworks that encompass several jars each, and both of those jar sets are "provided" artifacts, like the use of "provided" artifacts in Maven, where we want to make them available at compile time, but those artifacts are not to be assembled into the deployable component, as they will be available at runtime, however the framework does it. Presently, these "provided" frameworks are specified in our Eclipse projects as "variables", but this is messy. If I end up specifying these numerous jars in ivy dependencies, it would be nice if I could group them, so it's clear what list of jars is part of framework "foo", and which is part of framework "bar". You could do this with Maven by specifying a pom that just lists those artifacts, and having projects reference that pom.
