>>* The argument that you have to update your library dependencies is a >>weak one, imho. > > ...until you have to go through and modify every single applet you have > deployed, which could be quite cumbersome. I know it will for me, because I'm > going to have to change every page in the demos and tutorials. Sure, I could > manually strip out the version number from the file names - but, if I'm going > to need to do that, why bother to include it in the first place?
Assuming you want your demos to use distribution JARs (which we'll assume for the sake of this discussion) this is only true for you because you deploy those demos to a Wiki, a very non-standard deployment. I have two applets and two web start apps that I deploy as part of my project, and I only had to make the version change in *one* place -- in my build file. Then that deploys my site and applications. Hand-coding HTML is long since outdated. > Consider this: even if you were concurrently working on projects requiring > different versions of Pivot, you'd probably just have a lib directory under > each one that contained the right version. When would you ever want to put > them in the same physical directory? When we're hooked into the likes of Fedora's package-kit RPM system (or Debian's Ubuntu's, etc.), which allows a Fedora user to select which packages they want on their system (like Ant, etc.) and automatically installs then to that /usr/share/java and requires that the versions are part of the file name.
