Hey,

Honestly, you are so far off the mark that it's not worth discussing. 

Geotools needs a build tool. You say a Java project doesn't need to have
a build tool and experience says otherwise. Not using a build tool would
be plain idiotic. Any reasonably sized project has a build tool. So look
around, notice that it is so, and ask yourself why. 

Geotools cannot afford to have more than one. That's experience from any
number of projects. Every effort to mix tools that I have ever seen has
been a total fiasco. Very tempting for the short sighted: "Hey, we can
do that in three lines of code with tool xyz." Very painful over the
long term. Look around, see that very few projects mix build tools, and
ask yourself why.

Which one to choose? Doesn't matter, Geotools chose. Much like choosing
a language determines the character of a project, choosing a build tool
is something that happens along the way. Changing is very costly and
only done for *really* good reasons. The only other tool with the power
of maven in common use that I know of is Ant. Several projects use Ant
with some success. When you compare the complexity of the OpenSSO system
based on Ant with the complexity of a maven based system, you quickly
see why projects are regularly moving to maven. But again, it doesn't
matter, Geotools chose maven.

Maven is not cast in bronze, merely carved in stone. For it to be worth
replacing, the replacement would have to be absolutely fantastic, widely
known, with repositories all over the place. So if you find something
that good, that widely supported, and that commonly known, by all means
suggest it.


So, if maven is a blocker for you, no problem. Grab a mercurial/bzr/git
copy of the full repository and hack away using whatever you like. Free
software for free people. Want to mix in another language? Great, it's
your code, do with it what you will. But, *if* you want to throw your
code into the common pool, then you have to do the work to play by the
same rules that everyone knows so that no one has to learn the
particular rules you happened to choose to work with. 

And with that, you have wasted enough of my time for today.

Have a good evening,
--adrian


And no, "maven rocks" is not a feeling---it's observation gleaned from
the experience of all the other tools I have come across. I hate maven
just like I hate all build tools---getting code to build is a pain all
around. Maven rocks because it is far less painful than any alternative
I have ever worked with.





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