Apache Ivy Terms & Ambiguities

I'm learning how to augment my build with Ivy using a "brute force" method of just trying to get a few sample projects up and running. I've poured over the official docs and read several online tutorials, but am choking on a few terms that seem to be used vaguely, ambiguously and/or in conflicting ways somehow. I'm just looking for an experienced Ivy connoisseur to help bring some clarity to these terms for me.

1. "Resolution" Cache vs. "Repository" Cache vs. "Ivy" Cache
2. The "Ivy Repository", as o开发者_开发百科pposed to my normal SCM which is a server running SVN

What's the difference between these 3 types of cache? What's the difference between the "Ivy Repository" and my SVN?

Thanks to anyone who can help!

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"Resolution" Cache vs. "Repository" Cache vs. "Ivy" Cache

The ivy cache is basically a folder, where ivy stores artifacts and configurations. If not configured differently it can be found in UserHome/.ivy2

The ivy cache consists of the resolution cache and a repository cache.

The repository cache contains the artifacts from a repository, that were downloaded by ivy. It is caching the repository, so that ivy won't need to query the repository every time it tries to resolve/download an artefact. If it finds an suitable artifact in the repository cache it will not query the repository. Thus saving the cost to query the repository. If and how the cache is used is a bit more complicated and depends on the dependencies/configuration.

The resolution cache is a collection of ivy-specific files, that tell ivy how an artifact was resolved (downloaded).

The "Ivy Repository", as opposed to my normal SCM which is a server running SVN

A Repository in the ivy world is a location, which contains artifacts(jar) files. This can be the local filesystem or a web server. It has no versioning system. Each version of an artifact is contained in a seperate folder. You can't commit artifacts, you just add them to the file system. See the terminology

  org\artifact\version1\artifact.jar  
  org\artifact\version2\artifact.jar

A repository is accessed via a resolver, which has to know the layout of the repository.

From the doc on caches:

Cache types
An Ivy cache is composed of two different parts:

    the repository cache
    The repository cache is where Ivy stores data downloaded from module repositories, along with some meta information concerning these artifacts, like their original location.
    This part of the cache can be shared if you use a well suited lock strategy.
    the resolution cache
    This part of the cache is used to store resolution data, which is used by Ivy to reuse the results of a resolve process.
    This part of the cache is overwritten each time a new resolve is performed, and should never be used by multiple processes at the same time. 

While there is always only one resolution cache, you can define multiple repository caches, each resolver being able to use a separate cache.