I am, like the rest of the team here, right now a little bit busy with other projects, mostly work issues. Anyway, here are some comments on Depot.
Well, it was always my main intent to have a small tool to help solve the dependency issues during the build process. Also, as far as I am concerned I would like to see Depot evolving into the Ant area.Also, I think this problem can only be broken with small/focused/standalone tools -- like a browser separate from an HTTP server -- so folks don't get into an all or nothing situation. Hence, I think Depot ought start as a client, maybe forever.
Ant is still somewhat of a standard in the build community and it was never really a topic to also solve other dependencies as build dependencies (means, we are not resolving runtime dependencies, right?).
Sure, there are lots of other protocols which could be supported, but the one working is HTTP, and to solve lots of the dependency issues in Depot I believe we should restrict the usage to HTTP. If Depot evolves, we still could add more, but ...
So -- Avalon repository. How do we see about talking to it? What protocols/APIs? Depot tends to use HTTP (to a file system based repository, ala Maven's Ibiblio, ala ASFRepo spec.) What more is wanted?
Cheers,
Markus
