From: Ralph Goers <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Sun, 02 Jul 2006 21:16:47 -0700
Tim Williams wrote:
The "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" Principle. Ant has just worked
in the past, I wasn't around or probably smart enough to understand
why the move to maven but I can say from a user perspective it "don't
work". I'm over at forrest and, for learning purposes, like to
maintain a buildable trunk of Cocoon. That has been impossible since
the move to maven. I obviously understand that progress happens in
the face of this principle, but there are some cases where it should
be respected.
Actually, this is a good point. It was broken and the move to Maven was
(and is) an attempt to fix it. Requiring a source download of Cocoon and
for end user's to perform their own configuration and build was (and still
is) seen as unacceptable by many of us.
Personally, as a user, I've never had a problem with this. It's no harder
than running the build script for our own application. Besides, I may want
to apply the odd patch from JIRA that's not been applied yet in SVN before I
build it. With Maven I've then got to mess around managing a local
repository for the patched version.
Furthermore, every Maven "customer" has their own way of creating their own
Cocoon-based webapp because there just isn't a good standard way of doing
it with Ant. Maven, when it works correctly, will fix this.
From what I've heard on the list so far, though, the Maven build is a long
way from working correctly. Until it does, I'm not wasting my time trying
to look at Cocoon 2.2, I'm sticking with the 2.1.x branch.
I can't recall seeing lots of bug reports in JIRA saying "the Ant build
mechanism sucks". On the other hand, there's nearly 90 open issues for the
forms block. Draw your own conclusions as to what users think needs fixing
and what works well enough... Then go and do whatever is best technically,
since what do users know anyway? :-) We'll catch up again and learn the new
ways once it's done and working. But in the meantime don't be surprised at
the lack of feedback; you haven't yet convinced us it's worth the pain.
Andrew.
