3rd-party libraries copied to /lib directory in Ant/Ivy projects

Question

I recently saw a project with quite a few sub-projects, each of them with a build.xml and an ivy.xml.

When building these sub-projects apparently all 3^rd-party libraries declared as dependencies are copied to a /lib directory in each of the sub-projects. Coming from Maven this looks really strange.

Is this a limitation of Ant/Ivy not being able to build a classpath from the local ~/.ivy2/cache?

Or is it a lack of Ant/Ivy knowledge at those who created the respective xmls?

Or is there a good reason to do this exactly like this with Ant/Ivy?

Answer 1

Hard to comment without seeing the ANT build files, but your description would suggest that the ivy cachepath task is not being used.

Hopefully the following answers will help explain how ivy configurations (similar to Maven scopes) can be used to manage classpaths exactly like Maven:

• Ivy, what is the master configuration and why is it not pulling jvyaml?
• How to avoid copying dependencies with Ivy