> 2) I don't think web services are the way, as the notion of repository
> doesn't necessarily mean 'central'. You can have a repository on your
> own machine, that your projects and apps use. You can then just
> synchronize once in a while if you care. For example, 'released apps'
> that use it may want to target specific versions, like Velocity 1.0.1 or
> Ant 1.3. But for development, you might want to always going against
> latest version, or default version (they are two differnet things). So
> specifying "*" for version in the API calls could mean latest, and "-"
> mean default [or similar...].
>
If you start with files, the repository can sit locally for a developer,
and is a simple matter of:
cvs checkout jakarta-commons-sandbox/cjan/repository
and then pointing the tool to the local directory. This would eliminate
the build time net connection for the repository, hopefully speeding it
up a bit. Not to mention that you can create your own repository, so if
your company only allows version 1.2.1 of xerces.jar, then that is the
only one you can download and so on...
Scott
