I'm in the process of converting a large group of projects to use Ivy where I work. During our conversion, we decided to use a properties file to provide a single place to manage the "accepted" versions of our external dependencies and use an ant property in the rev attribute of the dependencies in each ivy.xml - that way, if a project needed to update to a new version of a dependency for testing, it could change it's local version to a specific version, but updating the entire set of projects to a new version of, say, log4j was as simple as changing one value in a properties file rather than finding and changing every reference in each ivy.xml that needed it. Not only that, but we keep an ivy-configurations.xml and an ivysettings.xml in a support directory at the top of the entire directory structure for all of our projects which define our configurations, configuration mapping rules, and settings - which is set in a property that is passed into each project's build task via subant while building. We have a "no relative paths" rule in our build files for referencing ANYTHING outside a project itself - anyone adding any form of "../whatever" to reference a shared resource folder gets in trouble. The problem is now that we're looking at IvyDE, there's no way to tell it where to get those properties... it would be nice if there was a way to tell IvyDE to load a properties file (or multiple properties files) to be used for resolving properties in an Ivy.xml file. Are there already any thoughts in this direction?
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