[announce] Artifact Antlib for Maven 2.0 alpha 3 Released

[Brett Porter <br...@gmail.com>]

Hi,

This is an announcement that along with the Maven 2.0 alpha 3 release,
an updated version of the dependency management antlib has also been
released. Thanks for all the feedback we received last time.

Download: http://maven.apache.org/maven2/download.html#ant
Documentation: http://maven.apache.org/maven2/ant-tasks.html

This antlib is available separately to Maven and allows you to use
Maven's artifact handling for dependency management and publishing
your built artifacts into a repository. It includes transitive
dependency support, SNAPSHOT resolution and publishing (numbered
development builds), environment-based dependency profiles and more.
It supports accessing repositories over a variety of protocols: http,
ftp, scp, sftp, file, and preliminary support for checkout from any
supported version control system.

New features since alpha-2 for the antlib:
- completed documentation
- can create a fileset from the dependencies
- can now access a POM as properties in Ant
- can use a POM to specify dependencies
- verbose mode that tracks what dependencies are being resolved and why
- can now read the Maven2 settings.xml file for proxy configuration, etc.
- can now use a typedef to include the antlib from your script, where
previously it had to be on the classpath

Changes in the underlying artifact handling mechanism:
- support for attached artifacts where present in the repository -
source JARs, EJB clients, javadocs, etc.
- profile support - the ability to have different dependency (and
build) configurations based on environment triggers such as the JDK
version, operating system, or properties selected.
- "provided" scope for dependencies that will be present in the
runtime environment and are only required for compilation
- the ability to exclude unwanted dependencies from the graph.
- some improved error reporting
- architecture will now support version ranges and alternate conflict
resolvers (currently, use-nearest is always used - this feature will
be enabled in the next release after more testing)

Note that some Maven artifact handling features are still not exposed
directly through the Ant tasks - if you are interested in any in
particular, please let us know.

This release is very close to being feature complete, and the syntax
is expected to remain stable now through to the final release.

Please join us on users@maven.apache.org if you have any questions.

Regards,
Brett

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