- Do artifacts ever expire on the Maven Central Repository?
- Is there a size limit to how big each artifact can be?
I ask because some artifacts can get very big and I am concerned that this may cause problems down the line.
I’ll give you a simple example. My library depends on the Boost C++ library. Boost starts out with 241MB of sources (75MB compressed). When you compile it, you end up with 2.78GB of binaries (200MB compressed) per compiler/platform combination (i.e. Visual Studio 2010, Windows, 32-bit). You then have to multiply that number by the number of platforms you want to support.
On the one hand, I don’t want users building Boost themselves because it is a very painful and lengthy process. On the other hand, I get the feeling that uploading GB of artifacts per release is not the right way to go 😉
My library only depends on a very small subset of of Boost so technically speaking I could upload just that subset (at a cost of approximately 10MB per platform). I am concerned about what will happen long-term. What happens if more people begin using Boost and each one uploads the subset that they depend on…?
See http://sourceforge.net/projects/boost/files/boost-binaries/1.44.0/ for an example of how Boost modules can be split up. As you can see, individual modules are quite small.
A similar topic has come up before: http://maven.40175.n5.nabble.com/Best-practice-re-releasing-large-assembly-artifacts-td3250739.html but in my case I am not trying to deploy assemblies into central. I am trying to deploy individual artifacts that happen to be very large.
Let me know what you think.
I ended up posting my artifact as-is. No one has complained yet.