On 7/5/06, Stephen Duncan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
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.
There's always the possibiblity of adding a new version ourselves with
a build number, like 1.0-1 where only the pom changes. Only as an
exception when a project is dead or don't release often
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.
Well, if everybody does that then there's no community benefit and we
all lose. When I need something not in ibiblio I put it there because
it's not much harder than putting it in my local repo.
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.
You can always have poms for different maven configurations against
only one jar, see
http://jroller.com/page/carlossg?entry=optional_dependencies_in_maven
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.
You can see in http://opensource.atlassian.com/projects/spring/browse/SPR-1484
that Spring got pressure from their users to provide POMs, it's by far
the most popular issue. Any project that wants to succeed must listen
to their users
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.
You can download Spring, jar the stuff up and submit them for adding
to ibiblio. I don't understand how can you complain when maven is the
only project providing that feature.
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.
My view is that it's getting better, more jars, more poms, more
javadocs, more sources, and more and more projects caring about the
repository, being a must for them.
--
Stephen Duncan Jr
www.stephenduncanjr.com
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