RE: Here is my Centipede scepticism

Mats wrote:

	OK, valid points. I was thinking of using Centipede
	inside a company, where putting the jars on the local
	CVS server makes more sense than to force every developer
	to download every jar file from the internet. Intranets
	are almost always much much faster than the internet
	connection.

I have an intranet Ruper repository of my jars. It is a file system with no
"history", so no clutter when I update jars. Best though, I am creating a
farm of projects -- currently have tens, want hundreds -- and I don't have
to go into each project and update the jars when I want to update one. I
manage in a central place.

BTW: As was once mentioned, a jar in lib/ in CVS can overrides what is
pulled down from the repo. More management choice.

	Well, sure, but the argument also goes the other way.
	If a new release has a crippling bug that wasn't found
	in testing, then it makes sense to stay off the bleeding
	edge, and instead be conservative. I usually wait with
	introducing a new jar file until I've tested it for a
	while, and I'm always a bit nervous when upgrading. Why
	upgrade to a new jar file with new features you don't use?
	Sure, bugs are fixed all the time, but new ones are
	also introduced when new features are added.

Gump is for the nightly jars, and that continually breaks, you are right. It
is there to break, to get noticed, so future release are more stable. It is
great, but we aren't proposing that...

Ruper today gets the latest "release" or equivalent, not the nightly. Since
you can have a local repository you can manually manage what is in that
release. You can QA a release against the products before rolling out.

Further, and best yet, each project can state exactly what version of a jar
it requires compatibility with, it could even specify the exact version.
This allow a central repository, but per project control. More choice.

Jar Hell is out there, you are right about the downsides of making something
totally without controls. What Ruper it attempting, along with Krysalis
Version (http://metamorphosis.krysalis.org/version/), is to introduce some
tools to allow humans to delegate some of the painful Jar management to
computers.

	Well, I guess we see each others arguments.

Nice to open mindedly discuss arguments without arguing. :-)

regards

Adam



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