Hi,
Our shop uses Ivy/IvyIDE. We decided against maven because it seemed
verbose and unfriendly to our projects' customizations. The whizzo integration
with Eclipse was a big added bonus -- we'd tried to get Maven working with
eclipse to compile our projects but it never really seemed to work properly
(this was ~9 years ago).
I like Ivy, but I have trouble imagining using it without an IDE.
Modern IDEs are simply too powerful to sideline. Not sure which is worse:
converting to maven (hopefully eclipse integration is better these days), or
going back to directories filled with jars.
A third option appears to be IvyIDEA for IntelliJ, which has ~500,000
downloads, and appears to be maintained. Perhaps someone from the Ant team
can poke the Eclipse people and tell them that there are devs/teams that will
simply move to another IDE rather than give up Ant/Ivy/IvyIDE; it might be very
much in their best interest to put a dev part time on Ivy/IvyIDE.
Anyways, the prospect of losing Ivy contributes to my general sense of
deterioration in the Java dev space: Java's best build/dependency tool goes
belly-up. I know at least half a dozen important/useful projects which appear
to be on the brink of death. Also been seeing some bizarre tooling decisions
from the java people (after 20 years they got rid of the API doc's tree browser
-- wtf?!).
Hoping for the best ...
Ross
-----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: RE: Future of Ivy and IvyDE
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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
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