If this happens I will donate and admin a new MySDK.org website for the ASF
FOSS user group community. I am a major fan of ANT and see IVY and Eclipse
IDE bridge as critical. I will set up an email contact for me tonight at
r...@mysdk.org if you to reach me in the future. Kind regards.
m...@craighunt.us



On Mon, Dec 4, 2023, 10:15 AM Eric Milles <emil...@apache.org> wrote:

> Hello,
> I was just made aware of this discussion and thought I would share a bit.
> We use Ant+Ivy and Eclipse+IvyDE here (Thomson Reuters) to support dozens
> of java projects.  IvyDE has been working very well for the past many years
> and I have only minor issues with it form time to time.  Mostly an eclipse
> restart and ivy refresh fixes it.  So a big "thank you" to all the
> maintainers over the years.  Ant+Ivy has kept us out of Maven or Gradle
> tangles.
>
> In terms of ongoing maintenance, I have picked up the Groovy Eclipse tools
> (https://github.com/groovy/groovy-eclipse) and the Microsoft Team
> Explorer tools (https://github.com/microsoft/team-explorer-everywhere),
> so I do have experience with Eclipse IDE development.  If someone wants
> help getting builds run and update sites created and verified, I can help
> with that.  If there are bugs in IvyDE that need attention, I could help
> with that as well.
>
> It sounds to me like Ivy and IvyDE -- even as a retired subproject --
> should move out from under Apache Ant.  Just for my clarity, is Apache Ivy
> a top-level project or a subproject of Apache Ant?
>
> Eric Milles
> ASF member/contributor
> Apache Groovy PMC member
>
> On 2023/09/05 16:52:38 Nicolas Lalevée wrote:
> > Hi there,
> >
> > I used to be involved, especially in IvyDE, and as many, my build tools
> and my IDE changed (for the IDE I am glad, not for the build tools…). So I
> had no particular interest of doing any maintenance, so much that lost
> track of the last releases of Ivy, where I could help. Many many thanks for
> those still around keep things not completely stalled, especially for those
> who doesn’t know the code base.
> >
> > For IvyDE, we wanted to retire it some years ago. The community raised
> some interests, so we didn’t proceed. But many years later, the proof is
> that is not maintained. Me too, I think it should be retired now.
> >
> > For the current IvyDE users, it shouldn’t be a concern that IvyDE is
> retired as an Apache project. You will still be able to continue to use the
> plugin. The released artifacts of the updatesite are archived [1] and won’t
> disappear. We would just announcing officially what in practice happens: it
> is not maintained anymore.
> >
> > And we tried our best to be opened on how to build and release the
> plugin and the updatesite, it is documented [2]. On my machine which just
> have Ant and Java installed, I just tried and I have been able to build of
> the updatesite with the last release of Ivy without much effort. Doing a
> proper Apache release of that is another subject, there are signatures, at
> least verify that it actually works in a real Eclipse, votes, and so on.
> And adding features and even fixing bugs is a very big step to get
> involved, it requires a complete Eclipse SDK setup. But at least headless,
> if it is required, I think anybody motivated enough should be able to re
> build it locally, the updatesite too. It wouldn’t be as much user friendly
> as it is today, but you should be able to work with your preferred IDE and
> dependency manager for as long as Eclipse is having 4.x versions.
> >
> > Due to my particular former involvement in IvyDE (I know it well), and
> my lack of involvement in the Ant community lately (I don’t read all
> mailinglists), if you have issues with the build or the code of IvyDE, you
> can mail on ant-dev@ and CC me directly.
> >
> > That’s for IvyDE. For Ivy, it kind of feels different due to the general
> usage which continues to exists, as we can see people are searching
> vulnerabilities in it.
> >
> > I am very sorry to read about missed opportunities to help new
> contributors, I didn’t saw them, very sorry about that.
> >
> > Then, acknowledging that even fixing vulnerabilities is painful to the
> community, I think we should accept to declare that we officially stop the
> maintenance, stop the burden on people involved in the Ant project.
> >
> > I hear the user community that we should still try our best to keep
> maintaining it, it is still worth it, I understand.
> >
> > So maybe we can declare a last call. The last maintenance window where
> only vulnerabilities will be fixed. Months ? 6 ? And hope that before that
> deadline, there are some interested parties that are willing to do proper
> maintenance over the project, here at Apache or elsewhere.
> >
> > Nicolas
> >
> > [1] https://archive.apache.org/dist/ant/ivyde/updatesite/
> > [2] https://ant.apache.org/ivy/ivyde/history/latest-milestone/dev.html
> >
> > > Le 22 août 2023 à 18:02, Stefan Bodewig <bode...@apache.org> a écrit :
> > >
> > > 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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> > >
> >
> >
>
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