Re: [Exist-development] Dependency management (Maven, etc...)

[Dannes W. <da...@ex...>]

On 10 Jan 2011, at 21:10 , Wolfgang Meier wrote:

> Concerning ivy: I spent a few days on it maybe two years ago. It was quite easy to set up and integrate into our existing scripts, but it
> suffered from the same lack of up to date repositories as Maven did. I ended up copying most of our jars into my private repository, which
> doesn't really help much. Things may have changed since then though.


We have to make a clear distinction of (1) the exist-db development process and (2) developers that use the exist-db jar files in their own projects.

(1) exist-db dev process

At this very moment we have no need to switch over to maven. Concerning dependancies: we have all relevant dependancies already in our svn repository. If you checkout from SVN, you basically have all jar files available.  For *some* extensions we need to download some additional jar files, for this we have a very simple (conditional) downloader in place. It works fast and just fine. 

Besides, we do quite some tricky things in ant, we'll need to migrate these tricks to 'a new maven construct' which costs time. For us this has no added value to invest time.....

As wolfgang says.... we'll end up in putting al these jar files in a private repository, that is a lot of work...


(2) developers that use the exist-db jar files

For this group, for sure, having all jar files (exist*.jar and all dependancies) in a *public*repository* might be very handy. A am convinced of that. But.... in all the time there has been no action (from the devs nor the community) to contact these public repositories and have *all* jar files installed over there.  

However, just putting the exist*.jar files is not sufficient, the majority of the dependancies cannot be found in public repositories. This means lots of (1 time) work to get them there. And.. who is going to maintain them?

side question: exist-db requires some additional files, e.g. config files. How can we deal with this?


I see the benefit of putting the exist-db jars (including the dependancies) into a public repository, if this helps the community to build applications based on exist-db. But we (I?) need help of the community to get access to such a public repository (in a non obstructive, easy and LICENSE obeying  way). I'd really like to see 'the community' help with this. For setup AND maintaining.... 


regards

Dannes


--
Dannes Wessels
eXist-db Open Source Native XML Database
e: da...@ex...
w: http://www.exist-db.org