sync to maven repo, was: release status as of 9/28/04

[Jeremy Boynes <jb...@gluecode.com>]

Daniel John Debrunner wrote:
> 
> Samuel Andrew McIntyre wrote:
> 
> 
>>4 - Please comment on what the content and form of the release should
>>be. I think jars, javadoc and HTML documentation should be included,
>>since that is what we have at the moment, packaged as a zip and tar.gz
>>file. Please speak up if you are interested in rpms for this first
> 
> I think there should be a packaging of the release that is just the jar
> files, no documentation included.
> 

Please can you incorporate distribution of jars to the maven repository 
on ibiblio so that they can easily be used in maven projects. I believe 
it is sufficient to physically place the jars in the right location at 
the ASF and they will then be automatically rsync'ed to ibiblio.

If you are familiar with maven please ignore the rest; if not this will 
explain why this is useful.

When you write a maven project you can declare in your project.xml file 
dependencies on external artifacts such as jar files. If those are not 
available on your machine, maven will automatically download them once 
from a central repository. This defaults to http://www.ibiblio.org/maven

For this to work, maven expects the files to be stored in certain way so 
  it knows what to look for. The default path is:
   ${groupId}/${type}s/${artifactId}-${version}.${type}

where the variables are defined in your project.xml file. For example, 
for Derby version 1.0 the dependency would be:
    <dependency>
      <groupId>incubator-derby
      <version>1.0

and the resulting path:
    derby/jars/incubator-derby-1.0.jar

Once the file is download maven will not check the remote repo again; 
there is a special version "SNAPSHOT" intended for nightly builds which 
causes maven to compare timestamps every time and download again if the 
remote version is newer.

At least, that is how it works now - there are discussion on repository@ 
about adopting a standard repo layout but IMHO there are enough users 
vested already to warrant keeping the existing format.

Thanks
--
Jeremy