JJAR : Jakarta Jar Archive Repository
=====================================

Since about the end of March, I have been thinking about how I wanted to 
make building easy for compoenent consumers, and make maintenance easy
for developers.

Some of the things I thought are important are :

  *  minimal dependencies - shouldn't rely on any other jars to get things
     because one of the design goals is to help new users get started, to 
     help avoid much of the easter-egg hunting that we require to get things
     going.
  
  *  embeddable in applications : as just another API, it allows any app to
     embed the API in apps

  *  ANT support : once the basic API is in place, it's just a wrapper :)

  *  command line tool : to allow maintenance of a developers local repository
     as well as one-off 'go fetch' needs

  * etc

So I have put together a basic repository version.  It doesn't hope for the 
power of a CJAN - the whole CPAN-ish upload server, multiplexed mirrors, etc
can come later.  

What it can do now :

  * command line tool can list the repository for all items or singles packages
  
  * command line tool can fetch packages by request, and supports dependency trees,
    fetching all dependencies connected to the requested package

  * command line tool can verify package and version information
 
  * ant task to do fetching

Todo
----
- make 'modify classpath' flag work
- what do we do about names for jars for ant?  dependencies?
- put -rr flag for 'remote repository'
- add 'synch' verb to synch
- maybe change language from 'local repo' to dest because


The following is my scratchpad.... don't believe anything you read...

1)  jjar : tool to test, get, fetch
 
   -p | --pgk  : package, optionally package/ver
   -v | --ver  : version
   -j | --jar  : jar
   -c | --cp   : classpath flag

   jjar mark -p package -v version -j jarfile
  
     - marks a jar with the package and version

   jjar verify [ -cp | -j jarfile] [-p package [-v version ]] [-flr <rep>]

     - verifies that a jar is of the package and version
     - verifies that the package/ver is in the classpath
     - w/o parameters, lists all packages/ver
     - -flr : fetch into local repository if you don't have it

   jjar list [-p pkg [-v ver ]] [-r repository]

     - lists the packages or package info in a given repository or default

   jjar fetch [-c] [-jar <outputfilename>] [-rep <repository>] package version

     - simply fetches the given package/ver from the repository (or default)
       and puts in jar or local rep and optionally adds to classpath
  
   jjar repadd -jar file -info file -r

     - adds a jar to the repository

2) Zero dependencies outside of the JDK

To keep things simple, we want to keep JJAR at 
jdk 1.2 level (earlier?) and not
depend upon any packages.  This is critical as we want to
be able to use JJAR as a boostrap utility to do things 
like fetch ant, for example.  So no XML.


2)  respository information - we want in a Properties format 

   <package>.<major>.<minor>.desc = string
   <package>.<major>.<minor>.jar = <jarname>
   <package>.<major>.<minor>.href = string


3) version

  we want to regularize the versions :

     major number : integer
	 minor number : integer
	 version modifier : string

     <major>.<minor>-<modifier>

     1.0
     1.0-dev
     1.0-rc1