Ivy: Using dynamic revisions

Question

I'm having problems understanding how I to use dynamic revisions of Ivy effectively in my Java projects.

Currently, I have the following layout:

lib-a
revision: 1.0.0
status: release
dependencies: none

lib-b
revision: 2.0.0
status: release
dependencies: lib-a, rev 1.0.0

project-a
revision: 3.0.0
status: release
dependencies: lib-b, rev 2.0.0

project-b
revision: 4.0.0
status: release
dependencies: lib-b, rev 2.0.0

That means I always keep the status to release and use explicit version numbers. If I would change lib-a during development, say lib-a, this is quite painful.

I save the changes in lib-a, update the revision in the ivy file to 1.0.1 for a minor change. Then i need to update the dependencies of lib-b to announce the revision 1.0.1 of lib-a. Now I could either update the revision of lib-b and also project-a because project-a is the executable and contains integration tests which I need to run.

The second way is to re-publish lib-b with updated dependencies but same version. This usually works with ant on command line but not for NetBeans with ivy-beans plugin. They still use a cached version of the ivy file of lib-b. So I need to clean to local cache to make it work.

I use a common build-ivy.xml ant script that is in our SVN repository for all projects. Each project has a build.xml in the project's root that most of the time simply includes the build-ivy.xml. Sometimes necessary tasks are added or overwritten. I've just read here and here that the solution might be using dynamic revisions. As far as I understand it, I would set the revision in all ivy files to integration-latest and set the status in all ivy files to integration. Then, ivy would always resolve the latest version automatically. But what would I set the revision of my modules to? Omit it completely? How would I create a release version? Do I need to change all ivy files and set the status to release or would I perform a deliver task before publishing a module with overwriting the status to release if possible?

Answer 1

I would suggest reading the following tutorial on multi-module projects in Ivy.

• http://ant.apache.org/ivy/history/latest-milestone/tutorial/multiproject.html

ANT builds traditionally are big and monolithic. what you need to do is emulate Maven's way of splitting a large project up into a series of smaller builds. Each sub-build publishes it's artifact into ivy's local repo.

Ivy has lots of useful tasks for this kind of structure:

• buildlist - Called from your overall main build file. Use to look into each sub-module's ivy.xml and determine the proper build order (Some modules depende on others)
• buildnumber - Looks at what is already published and generate the next build number in the sequence
• publish - Push artifacts into local repo (or a foreign one, if configured in the ivysettings.xml file)