On 19/12/2011 09:42, Henri Gomez wrote: > There is many reasons to use Maven instead of Ant : > > * Better startup bootstrap for new comers, mvn package won't require > hack in build.properties, it just works out of the box.
No it won't. At least not until Eclipse publish the JDT complier JAR to Maven Central and the last few times I looked the only versions published were old ones it they looked to have been published by third parties. We could take on publishing the compiler to Maven Central but it would be more work than the current process. > * Parts of Tomcat, like JDBC POOL could be turned in modules and so > have a different lifecycle, ie release more often. We tried releasing JDBC pool as a separate component and it failed miserably. I recall many more failed release votes due to lack of interest than I recall release votes that passed. > * Easier deployment on Artifact Repositories (like Nexus) I don't buy that argument. It is as easy to publish to Maven central with the current process as it is to do so if the entire build uses Maven. From a release manager's point of view there is nothing in it. > * Better team-up with others Apache projects, like OpenEJB, who use > Tomcat as part of their package process I don't see these projects asking us to change our build process. I do see requests for additional artifacts but those are just as easy to produce with either build process. > Majority of major ASF projects are now using Maven and they can't all be > wrong. Looking at the experience in Commons (that uses Maven), I'd have to say that in my view Tomcat currently has the better release process. > So I still didn't understand why there is still such veto on using a > de-facto standard like Maven, widely used in companies and also ASF. I don't recall seeing a veto on this. I do see a number of committers that are far from convinced that Maven is the right way to go. > Sometimes ago, I heard, let's do a proposal. > Olivier did it some weeks ago and I don't see many positive feedbacks. > He even provided a hackhish pom so Ant and Maven approach could co-exist. I would say that the lack of feedback indicates the lack of interest. If Olivier's build process made my life easier, I'd use it. It doesn't, so I don't. > We hear more and more ASF is conservative and sometimes slow to adopt > new stuff (cf: git discussion) and I should sadly admit, it's still > case for Tomcat. Lets not re-hash the git discussion here. I agree the ASF is conservative and I think that is a good thing. It is a direct result of our consensus based approach to development. Yes it makes doing something new and radical harder as you have to convince folks that the radical new idea is a good one. But this has always been the case and we have had a process for this for many years [1]. I'm with Mladen on this one. Make a copy of trunk in the sandbox. Do what needs to be done to align with Maven best practices and show us how it is better than what we have at the moment. If someone would like to do the same for gradle or another tool, great. If there are real benefits, I'll vote for it. If it is just different then my preference will be for staying as we are. Mark [1] http://incubator.apache.org/learn/rules-for-revolutionaries.html --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@tomcat.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@tomcat.apache.org
