Hi Francis, first of all we all use Eclipse and the projects as they are in SVN at the moment are Eclipse projects (with the eclipse files also checked in). So if you just check out all projects under core and those under struts2-ext in one workspace you can compile and run them all.
I know that Maven can generate project files for Eclipse, NetBeans and possibly others and this is why I think it would be a good idea to provide Maven pom file(s) with the distribution. You are right, that maintaining two build systems would require more work, although I don't think that they would change very frequently. Getting rid of the old Ant script is certainly an option. When I thought about Maven support however, I wasnt thinking of changing the internal project structure as it currently is in SVN, since this is not the structure the user will see when downloading the distribution files anyway. Instead the buildRelease.xml Ant script creates the final structure of the distribution. Hence the directory structure you proposed can be provided by changing the buildRelease.xml Ant script accordingly. So I thought all we need to do is to provide Maven pom files and change the buildRelease.xml script. I am still not sure, what benefits the change of the internal project structure as currently in SVN would have for us. Since the projects files of the Empire-db internal development ant those provided with the distribution are somewhat different (e.g. regarding project dependencies and classpath) I assume so would the Maven POM files. Hence there have to be two sets of files anyway. Personally I am open for any kind of change if I can see the advantage. For the moment however I would prefer starting with a Maven solution for the users of the distribution first, and maybe later on we can change the internal project layout too. What do you think? Rainer
