Question

I’m talking about ivy 2, not some newer version.

Answer 1

Switching off the cache affects performance. Switching it off loses one of the big benefits of dependency management, because you’d force each build to download everything….

Having said that, over time the cache sometimes become stale, especially in situations where the remote modules might have changing dependencies (Can occur during development). To counter this problem I always include an extra build target that purges my ivy cache:

<target name="clean-all" depends="clean">
    <ivy:cleancache />
</target>

This gives you the best of both worlds. Disabling the cache is accomplished by first running a purge as follows:

ant clean-all build