On Mon, Mar 16, 2026 at 10:08 AM Björn Raupach <[email protected]> wrote: > > Elliot, I don’t want to stir up a hornet’s nest, but could you give me a > specific example of where it would cause a problem? > > In Maven 3.9.x the namespace declaration never mattered in all the > projects I used it with. I fail to understand why it matters in Maven 4. >
The problems pop as soon as you attempt to use XSLT, XPath, XInclude, XSD, or any other general purpose XML tool to process pom.xml files. If you don't do that and only use Maven's own libraries, you might never encounter problems. However, this removes a large ecosystem of well developed and supported libraries from our toolboxes. Not everyone uses these tools, but those of us who do really miss them. This will be more relevant to developers working on Maven itself and with non-Maven projects that rely on the Maven repository system (e.g. Gradel, bazel) than to Java developers who are simply building their projects with Maven. The latter won't have an obvious problem, but they will have fewer tools others have built for them, and progress on the tool they are using will be slower because Mavend developers can't use generic XML tools to do generic XML things and have to burn time and resources on more difficult solutions. Beware the Availability Heuristic. -- Elliotte Rusty Harold [email protected] --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
