I think the assumption you are making is that your project will only use public repositories. Personally, I have built a repository on one of my development servers and have populated it with our dependencies. We can maintain that repository for as long as is necessary.
As for source managing the dependencies, I used to do that as well. The biggest change/advantage is that you can checkout a module much faster if the jars are downloaded (and cached) separately from the source. Otherwise, if you were using a vcs other than Subversion, you may have difficulties efficiently storing binary data (ClearCase for example didn't do binary diffs when I used it, so complete copies of binary files were stored). Josh On Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 4:54 AM, Sebastian Krysmanski < [email protected]> wrote: > Hello, > > recently someone recommended Ivy to me because he saw that we were hosting > our project dependencies in our Subversion repository. I took this > opportunity to have a look at Ivy and on first glance Ivy seemed very nice. > However I see a major disadvantage over dependencies in a VCS repository: > If > a project is dormant for a longer period of time an artifact (i.e. a > library) may longer be available (in a certain, required version or the > repository may not exist anymore). > > If we were using Ivy this would result in the project no longer being able > to be built. If we're placing the libraries in our SVN repository however, > the project could still be built. How does Ivy "address" this drawback? Is > there any commonly used solution to solve this problem? > > Regards > Sebastian > >
