There was some interesting discussion lately about Ivy. It started with Colin’s blog entry about Ivy and transitive dependencies.

I think that if you decide to use Ant you’d better use something like Ivy to manage the dependencies in a painless way. If you choose maven just for handling dependencies you may prefer using Ant + Ivy, maven is not about just handling jars, I’d like to think that it’s more than that. As Dion I have to stand up for Maven too. It provides me more productivity than Ant.

You may agree or not but something I find really annoying is people trying to reinvent the wheel. Ivy uses the Maven repository at iBiblio and that’s great, we can collaborate to get a better repository BUT Brett is right about the new Ivy repository with dependency metadata, maven project info is already available under the groupId/poms dir and can be used from Ivy, better improve it than starting from scratch, isn’t it?

I’d like to say that some problem I usually find with that dependency metadata is that projects don’t spend a bit of its time to provide it, I don’t force them to do so just to please me, but many people rant about maven because it doesn’t handle dependency information and they should complain to each project developers, not maven.

N.B. A good idea would be an XSL to pretty print the info from the POM.

I expect that the new maven book written by Vincent Massol will proselytize more users 😉 and more importantly developers!