[emarcotte]

Some have suggested that maven as a solution. I guess the only part I'm missing is how maven ties into the actual system. From what I've seen it is always pulling from my ~/.m2 repository, or a full repository upstream. Is there a way to have like a "System" repository that yum/apt/etc could install into?

[lallysingh]

Getting things to build with maven's idea of a build process has traditionally been tough, but it's pretty good for auto-downloading dependencies. Usually I needed a shell script that had maven download some, then wget'd a few more (that, for licensing reasons, couldn't go in an upstream server).

Unless a slightly-customized maven is distributed, you'd have to put a ~/.m2/settings.xml in the new-user template that specified your local repository. Which isn't too bad.

[bokchoi]

Apache Ivy is another solution for auto-downloading dependencies but plays nice with Ant.

[mceachen]

Maven is the solution.

Anyone with more than a handful of developers should really be running their own maven repository mirror to shield deployments from external outages. http://nexus.sonatype.org/ is stable and simple to get running.

The fact that the libraries get downloaded to ~/.m2 should be irrelevant in production, because your deployments should happen against a deployment-specific role user, and downloads should be super-fast, because they're all from within your colo.

(all this being said, I haven't touched java and don't miss it at all since switching to Ruby on Rails to write AdGrok, and that's coming from more than 10 years soaking in java).

[quicksilver03]

I disagree: you should put in version control each library that your project depends on. I don't see what Maven adds beyond introducing an artificial dependency on a tool outside of your control.

[brown9-2]

Yes. You can change the default location for the repository.