(I apologize for cross posting this to the users and developers lists but it seemed like the right thing to do to spread this info.)
So in the end technically there was no bug however the default behavior was different than what I was expecting. I agree about preserving default behavior but there might be some things that could be done to improve or augment default behavior. In the meantime, here is a list of settings that need to be altered from their default to provide the behavior that I needed. These settings will give you the Maven experience. This I believe is a very important experience that should be easily attained. I had to debug to figure this out, but in the end Ivy was totally able to provide the desired behavior and still be Ivy. 1. Use dedicated caches per resolver (or at the very least a dedicated cache for the local filesystem resolver). Otherwise, Ivy will not distinguish between local and remote artifacts in the cache and may arbitrarily substitute one for the other. 2. Set defaultLatestStrategy="latest.time" in the settings element. Otherwise Ivy will use only alphanumeric sort when selecting between artifacts of the same version in different repositories. This is not useful at all when trying to pick up the latest integration build. The result is that you will get the first one found or the last one found based upon other configuration elements. 3. Set the property ivy.resolver.default.check.modified="true" so that Ivy does not falsely assume that an artifact never changes. 4. Set changingPattern=".*" on all resolvers so that Ivy will not exclude certain (by default all) revisions from being checked for modifications. In other words, the checkModified setting has no effect until you provide a pattern that matches the version number of the artifacts that are being resolved. 5. Use the force="true" attribute on a resolver if you wish to have it considered even after an artifact has been located by a previous resolver in the chain. This is fine tuning behavior for a build and the default is ok, but the behavior must be understood clearly as documented here. Generally speaking, without using this attribute (or setting it to false), and assuming that you use your internal resolver to publish local dev builds, listing your internal resolver first in your chain will always get you a locally published artifact even if there is a newer one in the Nexus repository. Setting this to true on a subsequent Nexus (url) resolver will select the newer of your local artifact (if present) and the Nexus artifact (if present). Not using this when publishing to your local repository means that you will have to delete your local repository when you want to pull an artifact from Nexus again. The opposite holds true - if you set force="true" on the Nexus (url) repository then you do not need to torch your local repository to get newer artifacts, but you may get newer artifacts when you least expect it if something somewhere else is publishing to Nexus. The last item (force attribute) is a very useful feature once you understand what how it behaves. What it means is, "force the artifact found by this resolver to be compared using the latestStretegy, even if a previous resolver has found an artifact of this name and version". Just keep in mind that not setting changing pattern and/or not setting checkModified are enough to abort the process such that subsequent artifact even if found, will not be considered. I really hope this helps users coming from the Maven world understand how to get the Maven experience from Ivy. And with that out of the way, users can then begin to leverage other Ivy features. Ivy provides the ability to do things that Maven just can't do, and with language besides just Java. That is huge and guarantees that Ivy will be around for a very long time. L.K. -----Original Message----- From: Antoine Levy Lambert [mailto:anto...@gmx.de] Sent: Sunday, March 29, 2015 7:35 PM To: Ant Developers List Subject: Re: Possible Ivy bug (and suggested fix) in ChainResolver Hello Loren, thanks for digging into all this. It might not be a good thing for softwares like ivy which have a lot of users in the wild to change defaults - because people like to be able to upgrade and still have an old behavior, but making the needed behaviors possible at least should be done. Your point 2 makes sense to me though, if two artifacts have as version 1.0-SNAPSHOT we should compare their timestamp. Point 3 your help will be welcome. Best regards, Antoine On Mar 25, 2015, at 3:00 PM, Martin Gainty <mgai...@hotmail.com> wrote: > > > >> From: lkrat...@blueorigin.com >> To: dev@ant.apache.org >> Subject: RE: Possible Ivy bug (and suggested fix) in ChainResolver >> Date: Wed, 25 Mar 2015 18:16:08 +0000 >> >> I found the root cause of the fishiness. It was not a bug (and was not >> actually in ChainResolver) but is in my opinion a rather unfortunate and >> poorly chosen default setting that is to blame (the latest-strategy). >> >> During resolution in the chain resolver, the current sub-resolver tries to >> determine whether it should be skipped and the previous artifact be selected >> over the current artifact. Assuming that the "force" and "dynamic" tests do >> not result in an early rejection of the current artifact, the "latest" of >> the two artifacts is selected by sorting the artifacts in a List using a >> Comparator suited to the current latest-strategy (latest-revision, >> latest-time, etc). >> >> The problem here is quite simple. The default latest-strategy is >> "latest-revision". So when a second artifact has been resolved, and it is of >> the same revision as the first, nothing gets sorted. The result is that you >> will get the first artifact found based upon the ordering of your >> repositories in the chain instead of the newer of the two artifacts. >> >> I think that either latest-time needs to be the default strategy or the >> latest revision comparator needs to do a secondary sort to sort by >> lastModified time. >> >> Possibly allow configuration of this behavior (should there be a secondary >> sort by time to avoid stale artifacts, or not so that repository order >> breaks the tie). This is important (critical) behavior and should be >> configurable. >> >> Defaulting to latest-revision will not only deliver undesired stale >> artifacts, but it is unclear to the user why they are getting stale >> artifacts or how to make it stop happening. The latest-time strategy will >> give you the latest revision 99% of the time and the latest artifact 100% of >> the time. But the latest-revision strategy will give you the latest artifact >> 100%, 50%, 33%, or 25% of the time when the revision numbers are the same, >> depending upon how many resolvers you have (1/n), and assuming that any >> repository may contain the latest artifact. >> >> Furthermore, the docs do not give a great description of "force". I learned >> much about the actual behavior of this attribute while debugging. First >> thing I learned was that it is not a good name. >> >> What force actually does is it allows a resolver to be considered when a >> previous resolver has found an artifact. After the first artifact has been >> found, only repositories with force=true will have a chance of competing >> (for instance, they might have a newer version of 1.0.0-SNAPSHOT). >> Otherwise, they are discarded immediately and no date comparison is >> attempted. >> >> Force should actually be named "considerAlways" or "considerAnyway". That >> seems to be a more suitable name. No action requested here, but pointing out >> that this attribute has a misleading name. >> >> Summary: >> 1 - Please reconsider changing the default latest-strategy to be latest-time. >> >> 2 - Please consider adding a secondary "lastModified" sort to >> LatestRevisionStrategy.ArtifactInfoComparator whether or not you change the >> default latest-strategy to latest-time or not. >> >> 3 - Please document, illustrate, and demonstrate in one place the >> behaviors of chain resolver in combination with force, returnFirst, >> defaultLatestStrategy, ivy.resolver.default.check.modified, >> useOrigin, and other settings and attributes that affect resolution >> behavior. (I am working on this document now.) >> >> 4 - Please consider creating independent caches by default for each >> repository. I have not drilled down on this issue yet, but I suspect that it >> fixes serious cache collision issues that I think I saw while debugging >> (found and selected local repo artifact, checked cache before delivery, >> ended up delivering cached stale artifact that came from a totally different >> repo :( ). >> >> Thanks, >> >> L.K. > > MG>i think we can take hints from maven brothers on a tested strategy > MG>to referencing dev jars during development..their solution is to > MG>employ SNAPSHOT version during CI cycles SNAPSHOTs are available > MG>until the jar is promoted to RELEASE at which point a tag is > MG>assigned to version SNAPSHOT delivers > MG>${project.id}-YYYYMMDD.hhmmss.jar so unless you have multiple > MG>machines able to gen deployables within a second the last second is > MG>the arbiter which clearly identifies the latest jar Snapshot > MG>versions are ephemeral until the next snapshot build so remote > MG>lookup would not be implemented > http://books.sonatype.com/mvnref-book/reference/pom-relationships-sect > -pom-syntax.html > > MG>repository caches when stored within a regular Nexus Repository are > MG>typed as Proxy/Hosted/Virtual ProxyApache,ProxyCentral or > MG>ProxyCodehaus Hosted3rdParty,HostedRelease,HostedSnapshot > MG>VirtualRepo (Virtual repos are generally for OSGI bundles) Once you > MG>know the general type Proxy or Hosted or Virtual you can then > MG>select sub-type (such as > MG>Hosted3rdParty,HostedRelease,HostedSnapshot) > https://books.sonatype.com/nexus-book/reference/confignx-sect-manage-r > epo.html > MG>thank you for taking the necessary time to think this through > >> >> From: Loren Kratzke >> Sent: Tuesday, March 24, 2015 1:09 PM >> To: 'dev@ant.apache.org' >> Subject: Possible Ivy bug (and suggested fix) in ChainResolver >> >> I have a some observations about how the chain resolver selects a >> dependency. I think this may be a bug but I am not sure because the intent >> of the source code is not entirely clear. It reads one way, but behaves in a >> different way. I have pinpointed the exact spots in code where this happens. >> >> Here is my simple test setup used to debug this issue. I have two resolvers >> (Filesystem and URL) configured in a ChainResolver in that order. I publish >> to one resolver and then the other repeatedly and consume the result in >> another project. I use checkModified=true and changingPattern=".*" on both >> resolvers. >> >> My artifact is simply a text file with the current date and time so it is >> easy to see whether you get fresh or stale artifacts from the repos. >> >> When I consume the published artifact from the other project, I will get the >> artifact from the first configured resolver in the chain (Filesystem in this >> case). But I know from debugging that the second resolver is also evaluated. >> So as an experiment, I added force="true" on the second resolver to see if I >> could force Ivy to ignore the first result and favor an artifact returned by >> the second resolver. Instead, Ivy returned the artifact from the first >> resolver even though the second artifact was newer AND the second resolver >> had force="true". >> >> When I debugged this to see why the first artifact was chosen over the >> second artifact, I found something very fishy. >> >> ChainResolver.getDependency() iterates over each resolver in the chain. >> First it found the Filesystem resolver and the artifact and next it found >> the URL resolver and artifact. Next it calls BasicResolver.getDependency() >> which will compare the previously resolved artifact with the current >> artifact. >> >> This is where it gets very fishy. At the end of the getDependency() >> method it calls AbstractResolver.checkLatest() which I assume is >> intended to return the latest of the two artifacts. But that >> comparison never happens. AbstractResolver.isAfter is invoked with >> two artifacts to be compared and a null Date. Since the date is null, >> the two artifacts are never compared and no matter what, the first >> artifact will be returned and the second one discarded and a verbose >> message will be emitted stating that the second artifact is older >> than the first artifact, every time. The message is on line 533 of >> AbstractResolver. (I am looking at Ivy-2.3.0 so if that line does not >> make sense on trunk then let me know.) >> >> Message.debug("\tmodule revision kept as younger: " + newModuleDesc); >> saveModuleRevisionIfNeeded(dd, newModuleFound); >> return newModuleFound; >> >> The message is not true. The artifact that was kept was the older of the two >> and a comparison of lastModified never happened (and never can happen in the >> current code as far as I can tell). >> >> So the actual logic in AbstractResolver.checkLatest() simply returns the >> first artifact found. While this is not a bad behavior, it does not seem >> like it is the intended behavior. I mean, why go through all the trouble of >> pretending to compare two artifacts using date methods when the logic never >> executes because the passed in Date object is null. And why emit a message >> stating that one was determined to be older than the other. That is super >> fishy. >> >> Furthermore, the next line in ChainResolver.getDependency() after >> resolver.getDependency() is called (ChainResolver line105) references >> isReturnFirst(). That is fishy because none of that matters any more. The >> current artifact was rejected on the previous line of code and the previous >> (aka first) artifact is now the current artifact and is the one that will be >> returned (without a date comparison, and for the arbitrary reason that is >> was found before the other one). >> >> I think that the intent of the null Date object is to compare each artifact >> to a static Date configured elsewhere (I have no idea where), but if the >> code were to actually compare the lastModified dates of the two artifacts, a >> useful result would happen - Ivy would return the latest artifact from >> across multiple repositories. >> >> That is huge because I have never been able to get Ivy to do this. I have >> never seen anybody get Ivy to search multiple repositories and return the >> latest artifact. This is useful for local development when you publish >> locally to consume locally modified artifacts. It would be nice to have the >> option of picking up newer artifacts from a central repo when those occur >> without having to blow away a local repository and its cache. >> >> (By the way, giving my local repo its own cache seems to have solved >> some other strange issues I was having. I recommend this to everybody >> and I think it should be a default in Ivy, but that is debatable and >> would need some more research and concensus.) >> >> I think that this is a good feature and should be configurable. I think >> possibly it was intended to be configured via >> ChainResolver.returnFirst="true|false" but that code executed when it was >> too late and the decision had already been made. If I were to make this a >> feature, and make it configurable, I would configure this using an attribute >> named returnFirst because that is the exact facet of functionality that we >> are talking about here. >> >> Thanks for your attention. Hope I am helping here. I am considering coding >> this to see if it works as expected. I would be happy to report my results >> and provide a patch if anybody is interested in evaluating this. >> >> L.K. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@ant.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@ant.apache.org
