On one of my recent projects I started to use Maven as our build tool rather than ant, as to take advantage of those extra reports and logs Maven can generate via it's plugins.
I found it really cool that it can download dependent jar files directly over the internet but then I wondered, how do people track the history of their dependent jar files as they won't be kept in CVS, etc?
I know people generally abhor checking jar files into CVS as they are binary files, etc, and I can understand this, however if you don't check them in, how can you roll back and build a project released a year ago that used version 1.1 of some dependency that is now up to version 1.5?
Or will Maven's repository keep all known versions of all software forever?
Any thoughts?