On Feb 4, 2008, at 8:49 PM, Dan Fabulich wrote:
Tim O'Brien wrote:
I'm sorry, hold on... starting stopwatch.... "mvn help:describe -
Dplugin=nifty -Dmojo=nifty -Dfull" - alright, I type fast, but that
took me 10 seconds. Then I hit enter and a whole *crapload* of
information zoomed past. Ok, CTRL-R, mvn, adding a "| less".
Ok, for something like "help:describe", I'm looking at eight or
nine pages of sleep inducing variable names.
Slow down, we agree more than we disagree. That's why I filed a
bunch of bugs against MPH today:
http://tinyurl.com/2c4j42
In particular, I think MPH-31 and MPH-32 would be good fixes, and
don't require weird changes to core. I'd prefer you'd typed "mvn
help -Dcmd=nifty:nifty", and that "mvn help" explained how that works.
I'm serious the help plugin hurts, go back to what Jason said about
svn doing a better job.
(Didn't I say that?) I'm not saying that the help plugin is
perfect; I'm saying that we don't need to re-invent the wheel or
hack the CLI to make this feature work, and that if you want to use
it, you can start doing so right now.
Well I think it would help to make it a bit more accessible. All that:
mvn help:describe -Dplugin=<blah> -Dmojo=<foo> -Dfull
Should likely be changed to something easier to type:
mvn-help dependency
or
mvn-help ant:run
mvn-help -l <lists all plugins>
No? Yes?
But as for finding plugins, it's better to search the Internet for
that sort of thing, rather than trying to turn the Maven core into
an Internet search engine for Maven plugins.
Dan, can I quote you on "It's better to search the Internet for
that sort of thing" the next time I have to defend Maven to some
end-user who is absolutely enraged by the fact that they've had to
spend the last fourteen hours trying to track down the reason why
the dependency plugin they have installed doesn't support the tree
goal even though the documentation on the Maven site tells them to
run it (Hint: they don't have the right version)
Version diagnosis is very different from finding plugins to use. It
IS better to search the Internet to find plugins, which is what the -
G switch is all about. (It tells you about all plugins available
everywhere, not just the ones you've got installed.) Searching the
Internet isn't better to diagnose version problems, but then, -G
wouldn't have helped that either.
I guess I disagree here because I believe the following statements to
be true: mojo is something of a horror (it's getting a little
better), plugins on the Maven site are often dev versions, the future
of the success of Maven is for plugin development to become very
decentralized (see Springer's Docbkx, and the Israfil Flex plugin)
I think a simple tool, packaged with Maven that knows of some plugin
groupIds. Would be a great thing. Run it, it lists all the plugins
it knows about, you can see information about them. It's like gem
for Maven..
In fact, the help plugin is a pretty good way of diagnosing
versions, or at least starting to. "mvn help:describe -
Dplugin=dependency -Dmedium" will tell you what you can do with the
dependency plugin you've got installed and, prominently, what
version you're using.
Annoyed by those -Dfull and -Dmedium flags? Me, too... that's
MPH-31, MPH-32, and MPH-35.
No one is saying they want Maven to be the "Internet Search Engine"
for plugins. Maybe someone is saying, "what we have now isn't
adequate". Seconded.
We agree again!
Alright, Dan, let's do it. Let me know how I can help.
Makes sense. But, wait, in that help:describe, you didn't call it
a "goal", the property was a "mojo"?
Yeah, that's why I already filed MPH-33 earlier today.
I dig.
-Dan
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