Hi,

I'd like to say that we're seriously considering migrating our dependency 
management from Gradle to Ivy because of the lack of branch support in Gradle's 
dependency management, and because we can't find a way to modify Gradle's 
dependency management without also changing its core. We can create a custom 
resolver in Ivy that supports our branch scenarios, and apparently without 
touching its core.

So I hope Ivy has a future.

Martin

-----Original Message-----
From: s.an...@infass.com.INVALID <s.an...@infass.com.INVALID> 
Sent: Tuesday, August 22, 2023 12:45 PM
To: ivy-u...@ant.apache.org; dev@ant.apache.org
Cc: u...@ant.apache.org
Subject: [**EXTERNAL**] RE: Future of Ivy and IvyDE

Hi,

I can't really discuss how many developers use Ivy and how it is difficult to 
maintain this project if there is not enough maintainers...

But I can give hints about our usage in our companies:
* We love "ant", it's for us a clear language syntax that can achieve our build 
processes like we want (and we have a good expertise about it)
* We had need to move on more modern way to handle dependencies
* We use ivy for that
* We have a tight integration inside our custom CI chain and in our IDE. We 
didn't use IvyDE

For sure, we know that "ant" is an older daddy inside the building tools area

Ivy have their caveats but we are able to integrate it nicely inside our build 
chain.
We can have 2 orientations:
* Move to another build tool and don't use anymore ant
* Move to another dependency tool usable by ant (at this date, I'm not sure, we 
have real alternative to Ivy)
* Continue to use Ant + Ivy as long as we can 

What I can say : we appreciate the couple of ant + ivy and if possible we would 
love to continue to use them !

Sébastien.



-----Message d'origine-----
De : Stefan Bodewig <bode...@apache.org> Envoyé : mardi 22 août 2023 18:02 À : 
dev@ant.apache.org Cc : u...@ant.apache.org; ivy-u...@ant.apache.org Objet : 
Future of Ivy and IvyDE

Hi all

before I get to the actual content of this mail:

* I'm cross-posting to three lists but I ask you to keep responses to
  dev@ant only (and join the list if necessary) if you want to respond.

* what I write is my personal opinion and not shared by the PMC as a
  whole. The people on the PMC know I'd be writing a mail like this
  sooner or later, though.

* this is a discussion, not a vote.

phew

I'm not quite sure what I hope to achieve with this email, but I'd like to 
share my thoughts - and raise the awareness of an elephant being in the room.

Over the past year we've had three security vulnerabilities discovered in Ivy 
and it took us much too long to get them fixed. The reason for this is there 
are no people left around who are familiar with the Ivy code base.
Most of the remaining developers around Ant are not even users of Ivy - I know 
I am not and have never been.

When it comes to IvyDE things are probably even worse as nobody of us uses 
Eclipse, either. But then again I've not managed to create an Eclipse update 
site for the last two Ivy releases so maybe nobody is using IvyDE anymore 
anyway.

At least *I* don't see myself digging deeper into the Ivy code base in order to 
fix non-critical bugs. And even for the critical ones I feel we are not doing 
an adequate job. To me it looks as if Ivy and in particilar IvyDE are no longer 
really supported by the Ant project.

TBH I'm not quite sure what to do about this. Even if people stepped up to 
maintain Ivy, the rest of the Ant devs would probably be unable to verify the 
changes they want to make. At least I certainly am not willing to review bigger 
PRs/patches to a code base I don't understand well.

Personally I believe we should send IvyDE to the Apache Attic immediately, and 
this likely should be the destination for Ivy sooner or later as well.
In the case of Ivy we know there are people who depend on it (hi, Groovy
folks) so maybe we should give a date in the future until which we are 
providing security bug fixes to give people time to move off.

There may be the need for a dependency management system inside of Ant, I'm not 
sure. If so, then this should be driven by people who feel the actual need IMO. 
There may already be alternatives to Ivy I am not aware of.

Stefan


---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@ant.apache.org
For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@ant.apache.org

Reply via email to