On 20/12/2011 07:58, David Jencks wrote: > I think the benefit might be more on the order of encouraging people > who ask "where did this jar come from-- I wanna fix something". For > people familiar with maven, there is IMO a much higher barrier to > contributing to tomcat than a well-structured maven project.
I'm not sure I agree with this one. I think when folks find a bug they don't know which JAR the bug is in. A little debugging will (hopefully) tell them which class rather than which JAR the bug is in. Finding that class in a single source tree is arguably easier than trying to find it in multiple source trees. I do agree that compiling a fixed version of the JAR will be easier using Maven, if the user understands Maven but then we are back to folks that know Maven find Maven easier whereas folks that don't know Maven, find Maven harder. I agree that we need to have as low a barrier to entry as possible. The work that has been done on the build scripts has improved things significantly since I started work on Tomcat. I can hardly believe how much of a pain building a Tomcat 4.1.x release was compared to how easy 7.0.x is. Where I disagree is on whether a switch to Maven lowers that barrier to entry. I agree it lowers it for folks that already know Maven but don't know Ant but that it raises it for folks that know Ant but don't know Maven. > (BTW I > must add that I'm delighted that the tomcat community seems much more > receptive to outside input than it did several years ago -- community > unfriendliness seems to be totally missing now :-) ). That is good. Mark --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
