Re: A rethink of the Ivy migration

[Ross Gardler <rg...@apache.org>]

Thorsten Scherler wrote:
> On Wed, 2007-02-28 at 12:30 +0000, Ross Gardler wrote:
>> I've been having a rethink of our approach to the IVY migration.
>>
>> Pretty much all of our java dependencies are Cocoon dependencies. So why 
>> should we bother to manage them ourselves?
> 
> Totally agree. All dependencies should come from cocoon but cocoon would
> need to have an ivy.xml for it, right?

No, Ivy can parse maven dependencies. At least I assume that's the case. 
When I did a test with just cocoon-core in the dependency it downloaded 
a lot more than just cocoon-core.jar.

> The route that we are going ATM is very good for Ivy because we will
> hand over a first class rep but like you point out the java dependencies
> are Cocoon dependencies and we should manage the our specific ones.

I should have clarified that now that David has pointed us at the 
official Apache repo I'm finding that many many more of the artifacts we 
need are already there.

However, they are mostly coming from the maven repo, not the ivy ones. 
So you point is valid.

>> The latter route will require us to build a crawler, but Thorsten has 
>> already started on that with the Droids lab.
> 
> Yes, but the plugins that I wrote are not yet ready to go prime time. It
> should be easy to make them stable (more if we going to use them here)
> but ATM there are not (needs more eyes and input). 

Yeah, I realise that, good you pointed it out though not everyone here 
is on the labs list.

I'm interested in using Droids in Forrest2, but that is still 
experimental so is not getting a great deal of my time right now.

> The implemented crawler x-m02y07 is more wget style and we can use it as
> base for the cocoon cli. I actually wrote the crawler having our use
> case in mind. 

Cool. We only need wget style crawling to be able to reproduce the CLI 
in Cocoon. We need to support the ability to ignore certain URLS, but 
that's an easy task (I vaguely recall a FAQ on how to do this so we will 
need to support it).

> The critical issue is that we will need time to stabilize this new
> crawler since forrest is heavily based on the static export. 

Good point.

...

>> So, should we continue with managing our own dependencies or should we 
>> jump the short term hurdle and get the ivy branch working with Cocoon 
>> 2.2 snapshots?
> 
> The last option is the one that we would need in the future in any way.
> Still the question is whether we want to put the release on hold for
> another while.

The way I see it is the release is not happening because none of us are 
addressing the remaining issues.

Of course, I'm making it worse by doing the ivy-branch and making this 
suggestion. I'm also making it worse by playing with my Forrest2 
experiments rather than getting 0.8 out the door.

However, for me the delay in getting 0.8 sorted is a symptom of the fact 
that Forrest is getting quite difficult to maintain and I'm focussing on 
trying to address this.

I'm not asking people to help in the Ivy branch, I'd rather see others 
focus on the 0.8 issues (of course the choice is individual). That being 
said, I want to make sure what I am doing on the Ivy branch is 
worthwhile to the community as it moves towards or beyond the 0.8 release.

> I personally think that having only one dependency on cocoon is the only
> think that makes sense for us. I agree to Ross question: why should we
> manage cocoon dependencies?


More opinions please...

Ross