| > Glad you see an upside to JitPack Of course! It's very cool! But I don't think it can be used in production (or even in development of important projects). 1. Say I am the consumer and I use a library author's GH repo with JitPack. Then, when the author releases her library to Central/jcenter/Clojars/whatever, she's free to choose any group name she wants (JitPack can't force her to do anything), and once she does that -- and another of my dependencies transitively depends on that artifact -- I am very likely to get a bug that's very hard to track down. Alternatively, once she publishes to central under a different group name, you might choose to simply break my build, which is also undesirable. 2. Maybe people shouldn't, but they do it all the time. I've done it on occasion, and I'm pretty sure I'll do it again. When that happens -- there's another impossible-to-find bug. > JitPack is built for the common case and not for the edge cases. Which means it's a binary repository that is undependable. And remember, those edge cases are out of the library consumer's control. > just because there are rare ways to break the system Unfortunately, they are not rare. First, most (actually, virtually all) production-quality Java/JVM libraries are already hosted on some public Maven repo, and any library that becomes production quality is likely to publish the artifacts, so breakage 1 is almost certain. As to 2, you should really get the data from GitHub. I think you'll find that deleting and re-creating tags is a lot more common than you think. But even if those cases were rare, they can be very, very costly. We're not talking about a breaking build, but actual runtime bugs that might take days to track down. > doesn't mean we should keep a high barrier-to-entry True, but the barrier-to-entry for the author is already quite low; jcenter makes it almost nonexistent. What you've done is something else: you've let the library consumer control the artifact, so you've lowered the barrier for them, which is great! However, by doing so you've ensured that the author will almost certainly inadvertently introduce really, really tricky bugs into the consumer's project, bugs that they can neither control nor track down. Still, JitPack is a great way to try someones work-in-progress code, to see if it might be worth it to help them make it production-quality. I am sure to give a try some time. |