Newbie question: Resolving to packaged artifacts and using them in build classpath.

[Eric Berry <el...@gmail.com>]

Hi all,
   I'm new to Ivy, but I am very interested in working with it. It seems to
have the flexibility and power I desire to handle many projects.

I am a plugin packager and releaser for the jEdit text editor (
http://www.jedit.org). The plugins are hosted on Sourceforge.net in zip
files. These zip files contain the plugin jars.

Some plugins have dependencies on other plugins - and on their required
jars.

Eg:

PluginA is bundled as PluginA.zip which contains: plugin_a.jar,
plugin_a_dep1.jar, and plugin_a_dep2.jar.

PluginB depends on PluginA.

I would like to have PluginB define a "compile" dependency on PluginA using
Ivy. Then I would like to have Ivy download PluginA.zip, extract the jar
files and include them in PluginB's compile time classpath.

Looking through the documentation for Ivy 2.0.0 rc2. It looks like there are
two possible ways of downloading the zip file. It looks like I can use the
URL Resolver along with some triggers to unzip the zip files and add the jar
files to Ivy's cache, or I could use the new Packager Resolver.

However, I am having trouble understanding how the extracted jar files get
included in the classpath of PluginB. What does the dependency definition
look like, and how do I add the jars to the classpath for use during
compilation?

Thank you very much for any help you can provide.
Eric

-- 
Learn from the past. Live in the present. Plan for the future.
11101000
http://www.townsfolkdesigns.com/blogs/elberry