Scope and status leakage during build lifecycle

[Stephane Bailliez <sb...@gmail.com>]

Just a couple of lines about something that has been bothering me for a 
long time.

Ivy stores a lot of properties (including an instance of itself after 
configure) while running, and other tasks add properties on their way as 
well.

I don't like very much this as it prevents to do separation of concerns 
between ivy instances, and resolve calls for example as it basically 
provides you a couple of nice way to shoot yourself in the foot rather 
transparently. A minor mistake is enough to make you scratch your head 
for some time.

The typical example would be that I have a common build xml which 
provides all the lifecycle needed for most projects.
It is doing the resolve for standardized conf and types.

Projects can override some targets to add their own dependencies and 
retrieve them.
Typical example would be to retrieve a binary file (or whatever which is 
not used for compilation but for running/packaging)

Which basically means that it must do its own resolve/retrieve call and 
thus will interfere with the properties that have already been set. So 
the packaging, publishing process (which is later in the cycle) , may 
actually be altered by the fact that I have ran a different set of ivy 
calls.

NB: This information leakage is particulary evil when you're doing a 
complex build with different setups where you're doing subant calls. It 
becomes very very hard to make sure you're not doing something wrong.

At first I would say: "Would be nice to at least have 'scopes' but there 
might be a better way.

Xavier, I suppose you have been thinking about this already ?

-- stephane