Thanks a lot for your detailed answer. The problem I am trying to
solve is slightly different to the one you are pointing at: I just
want to be able to control precisely what are the elements that are
used in some build so that any discrepancy between two builds of
the same source, which usually manifests itself as a compile or test
failure, can be analyzed quickly. I do not - yet - tackle the release
problem. 

As I said in my previous post, there are various techniques in maven
to ensure this. Those that I know and can think of are:
 - pluginManagement and dependencyManagement with all versions of
   plugins pinned down
 - prerequisites
 - enforcer plugin

It seems to be that a great deal of trouble is alleviated by pinning
down precisely what artifacts you are using for the build (not the
artifact you are producing), plus a couple of other things in the
environment. While I am aware of those various techniques and think
they are good practices that should be followed, I was wondering
whether a tool that could "compare" the local repository (ie. not the
local in corporate way, local in maven way) with some other build's
repository "signature" would be useful.

I have all too often been beaten by local succesful build (on
the developer's workstation) that yield failure on CI because some
dependency was added that had unexpected side-effects or the
environment is uncorrectly set (for whatever reasons),... I am also
aware that discipline and rigor always help in developing software,
but we are mere faillible mortals :)

I knew about SVN's HTTP features but thought that its WebDAV's ability
was somehow special (using something called DeltaV ?) and could not be
used by "mundane" DAV enabled wagon. Thank you very much for the tip.

But the local repository is accessed through filesystem so that I
would need further processing to version it. Maybe I could use a
custom ArtifactRepository that would version each run in a local
mercurial depot ?

That explains my interest in tools working with repositories: I could
use that to synchronize 2 local repositories, or to ensure that only
some artifacts are present and compare expecter/actual repository
structure...

Regards,
-- 
Arnaud Bailly, PhD
OQube - Software Engineering
http://www.oqube.com

---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Reply via email to