sleepcoding

It’s not logical, highly unnecessary and probably expensive. But anyhow we found ourselves in that environment no matter what. Problem stemmed from the fact that eclipse/RCP dependency system being incompatible with virtually everything out there. We were using ant/ivy and pretty happy with it but our UI side found no easy way of headless-building their application using it. Eclipse is trying to make use of maven 3 with a thing called tycho, but that’s another story. Point is, they were practically forced to maven, and so was i (us).  

The problem is, the eclipse project(M1), which is built using maven, depends on a project(I1) which is built using ivy. Since these projects are constantly evolving, dependency is for SNAPSHOT version. Add another oversight of choosing nexus as artifact repository manager, we ended up being unable to publish SNAPSHOTs with ivy and depending on them with maven.

We set M1’s updatePolicy value to always and expected it to re-download the snapshot artifact of I1 on every change but there is more than one way to do this. Ivy relies on the timestamps of those while maven uses external metadata to identify if a SNAPSHOT artifact has been changed or not. But, ivy has no idea about an external metadata file during publish/deploy so nothing to use for maven. (1)

Nexus can actually repair missing metadata files but i think (not sure) it requires the artifacts to be deployed with uniqueVersions (that funny timestamp-like things replacing SNAPSHOT). Of course, ivy has no idea about those neither. (2)

OK, we can disable uniqueVersions and get “SNAPSHOT” without funny timestamps. But no, because maven 3 got rid of the functionality and uniqueVersion is always on. (3)

Adding (1), (2) and (3); we had a huge incompatibility problem on our hands. Some researching came back negative (maven blaming nexus, nexus blaming ivy, ivy asking questions why maven?…) we fell back to disabling ivy-publish‘es and using mvn deploy:deploy-file’s instead. Reconfigured our jenkins accordingly and finally evaded problems.

Bottom line: don’t use ivy and maven together; it’s not logical, highly unnecessary and probably expensive.