Hi David, I understand you frustration. The documentation isn't that great. At the moment I'm putting together a set of Ivy 101 articles that may be of benefit to others. I too went though time and effort to learn it and still some things are not too clear. However, I did get it to work, even to publish my own dependencies into my own repository. The blog articles are not there yet, so I can't point you to anything at the moment.
I've taken the **completely unofficial** step of creating a temporary channel on freenode called #ivy. If you can jump on there I can help you out a bit if you like - depends on work load etc, but I can offer a few suggestions that may help. -=david=- On 5 October 2010 13:11, David Sills <[email protected]> wrote: > To whom it may concern: > > Help! :) > > I am a Java developer with 10 years experience, a masters degree, an IQ > above 160, and an excellent work ethic. I have spent 5 days trying to > figure out how to add Ivy to my current project. I do not have another 5 > days - that's just not practical at my job. > > I have read document after document, including the complete tutorial and > reference documentation. I have read the section in Ant in Action, > several apparently useful resources and blogs on the web. > > And still I have been completely unable to make even the simplest Ivy > configuration work for what should be an easy project. (One JAR file, > two JAR file dependencies.) > > If anyone is actually interested having documentation written (or maybe > a book, who knows) that can be read by someone who doesn't understand a > thing about Ivy, I would be willing to contribute to or even author > that. But first, I have to understand what's going on myself. > > All the examples I see are either way too simple or way too specific to > a particular project. The reference documentation doesn't really explain > what each attribute does in each file - it merely adds an English > description (which is sometimes self-referential). > > This is what I see so often in open-source projects: the documentation > is read by people who don't need to read it to understand things - they > already understand them. They only need to be reminded of things they > already know. And it doesn't occur to them (understandably, to be sure) > that someone who doesn't understand what they do might be confused by a > lot of extremely abstract terminology without really practical examples. > > I'm obviously not the first person to have this problem. A lot of people > I have read love Ivy but bewail the state of its documentation. I'd be > happy to help, but can someone first point me in the direction of a > step-by-step description of using Ivy? And I don't mean the tutorial, > which is fine but assumes a lot of things it doesn't specify. > > If Ivy's not for me, then who is it for? I'm an expert in using Ant and > really don't like Maven's inflexibility. Ivy sounded like the perfect > solution. But even with the best will in the world, I couldn't get > anywhere! > > Sorry for the rant. Somebody please point me to the blog where they > describe this "for dummies" (I'm not above this at all) and I'll just go > and make it work. Thanks! > > David Sills > > -- I prefer encrypted and signed messages. KeyID: B20A22F9 Fingerprint: 110A F423 3647 54E2 880F ADAD 1C52 85BF B20A 22F9
