On 7/4/06, Jason van Zyl <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On 4 Jul 06, at 2:37 PM 4 Jul 06, Steve Loughran wrote: The metadata will never be perfect but right now I still think it's far from being ideal because we have no real active process of improving it on a large scale. Carlos puts in a _lot_ of time trying to correct things and absorb changes submitted for improvement but as mentioned in the previous message it's a matter of education and automated tools running to point people in the right direction.
Well, but it seems (recently?) that a policy has been put into place that POMs already in the repository should not be corrected or improved, in order to preserve repeatability for builds depending on the existing version, and that corrections should be done by making new releases. It's hard enough to get projects to care about providing Maven POMs, but to ask for a new release seems a bit much. It also may seem ideal to have projects take care of their own POMs, but it makes it frustrating for users to provide information on fixes. I know, personally, I've cut down on contributing to central repository improvement. I've taken to simply installing new jars to my internal repository, because asking individual projects to do it gives slow-to-no returns. I put top-level exclusions into dependencyManagement rather than request changes to POMs, because again, there seems no process for actually getting that to happen that's not haphazard. I'll try to work on doing better, but the cost-reward ratio isn't helping. I think maybe some either feature or convention for handling version changes to just POMs so they can be improved without another release of the software would help. Some clarification/policy statements on when I should go straight to the project responsible for a jar vs. filing in Maven evangelism for uploads & for POM improvements might be helpful. Certainly some of the 2.1 planned features (like being able to rely on geronimo-transaction & have that take care of anything relying in javax.transaction:jta...) could help. I think some concept work needs to go into optional dependencies, because it we can't control when Spring decides they want to stop providing modularized jars, and move to a single jar that will essentially have all optional dependencies. I'm not looking forward to getting my projects to work with Spring 2.0. Believe me, this is all coming from someone who's been trying. I've filed bug reports with Spring, and Lucene, other projects to get Maven uploads. I've volunteered to work on providing and maintaining a Maven 2 build for an incubator project so that it will be easy to provide Maven jars & poms when the time comes. Oh, another quality issue. -source and -javadoc jars. It really slows down running eclipse:eclipse when half or more of my dependencies don't have these jars. And a lot don't. All of spring-1.2.7, for instance. My purpose isn't just to complain. I just think that there's going to have be more to it than "it'll get better over time" for the central repository to improve, because, from the narrow view of the things I use, it's getting a bit worse, not better right now. -- Stephen Duncan Jr www.stephenduncanjr.com --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]