Hi All, I'd like to start a new discussion on the roadmap for Ivy and IvyDE. We already decided to focus on a 1.5 version as being the next version, focusing on bug fixing, testing and code refactoring to ease new developer involvement.
I've already done a good amount of refactoring, and we are processing bugs reported in JIRA slowly but I think we are on a good way. On the other hand, I think that due to the number of refactorings made, we won't get a stable version at first shot. So I think we should first release a beta version to ease find and fix bugs. And this will also help decrease the delay before the first release in the incubator. Another thing is that I'm not sure a release with no major new feature will actually help adoption. And there is one feature I'd like to add that I think could really help new users: better maven2 integration. We could see that only as an improvement because Ivy is already compatible with maven 2 in some ways, but what I would like is a deeper integration, leveraging the m2 local repository for instance, so that one could could develop a component using Ant+Ivy depending on a component developed using maven2 (thus dealing with SNAPSHOT and so on). An advantage I see to this feature is that it would help leverage the high number of existing projects using m2, and also that we would need to address the most voted issue in our JIRA: flexible cache management [1]. Even if it's not mandatory to implement it like that, I think it would be nice if the m2 local repository could be considered as a cache by Ivy, while keeping its own cache if you want. Last but not least I need this kind of feature myself, and thus I'm both motivated and somewhat available to develop it. So my proposition is to provide better maven 2 integration and flexible cache management in next Ivy version. And I'd like to release a first beta of this next version in April, so that community see we are on a good way, users can begin using the apache incubating version and report bugs, and I can use it for my ApacheCon talk. For IvyDE I think due to the lack of time we should release a new version with the next Ivy version only including the migration to this new Ivy version and the project dependencies feature submitted as a patch. WDYT? - Xavier [1] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/IVY-399
