Unfortunately I have not much time to investigate into building a better Java package management system I talked (or better ranted) about yesterday. But sometimes walking rather slow means also avoiding walking too fast. There is more time for looking around. In the past I analyzed different projects and code bases, e.g. Maven, Raven and Buildr or Portage, but I didn't found a best match. Of course I'm seeing much potentials in Portage, but it's written in Python and this could be a no go for some developers.

Today I discovered the Kepler Project. Carlos Sanchez blogged about the Eclipse Summit 2007 and the need for a plugin/bundle repository for Eclipse. As he stated, one wish or idea is to use a Maven compatible repository. Kepler tries exactly that, beeing a standard package repository while preserving compatibility to other package formats. I will have to keep an eye on this project.

In my search for alternatives for Ant and Maven, Raven crossed my path. Here is a somewhat lenghty comment to Matthieu Riou's blog post Builds And Transitive Dependencies.

Transitive dependencies are an essential requirement dictated by the nature of software development. Each buildsystem which claims to be a real one (including package management), has to support transitive dependencies.

The question is, at what level this support goes and how clever these dependencies are handled. Working with Maven, I can say that dependency handling cannot going worse. Comming from the Linux distribution Gentoo I'm used to a package management system (portage) which is more clever than all tools I've found for the whole Java and scripting language world in terms of (transitive) dependency management.