We've been using
Ivy for project dependency management at OpenGamma since day-one. It was one of the earliest decisions we made, and I'm quite happy that we made it. Furthermore, the work that the
Ivyroundup guys have done to package up Ivy-specific files has been fantastic.
That being said, there's one big, honkin problem with it: Sun and their click-through agreements to download almost any of the "interesting" APIs that you need for enterprise software development. These packages (like the JMS or JavaMail APIs) are necessary for pretty much anything that you might want to do on a real system, and you can't legally put them up for download. And unfortunately,
there are a lot of them.
The workaround, of course, is that someone in your organization downloads them all, clicks-through on the agreement that is completely and utterly unenforceable, and then sticks them on a private Ivy repository and you configure your
ivysettings.xml file to refer to that location, but that's not particularly scalable. And for open source projects, it just doesn't work at all.
Yeah, we've got this Ivy thing so that it automatically identifies all the dependencies and downloads them so you don't have to do anything but have Ant installed. Except for the Java stuff, which you have to manually download and put into these particular locations, and that's a 20 minute task minimum.
Kinda takes the shine off the whole experience, doesn't it?
Now given that everybody seems to know that you can handle licensing restrictions in different ways (by a disclaimer in each file and a copy of the license included), why does Sun still live in the past? Why do they require a clickthrough for something that is essentially just
an explicit disclaimer of warranties and liability? Why can I download Eclipse or NetBeans without a clickthrough but not the JMS 1.1 API interface files?
Man, I hope the EU finally lets Oracle buy Sun and put this type of stupidity out of its misery.
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