Wade Chandler wrote: > Hmm. Your points make me favor Ant. Essentially it seems with Ant we > have more flexibility out of the box. There may be a little more work
Yes, this is a common problem. Yes, really. :) > to get what we want, but we can get what we want with Ant, and we don't > have any real lock in to a necessary structure; we can define our own The whole point of maven is to give you that structure and process, because of the realization (to which I subscribe wholeheartedly) that in 95% of all cases software that requires a custom build system is likely screwed up anyway. As someone who's been engaged in "open source" since the early 90s I cannot tell you how many hours I have wasted trying to make other people's supposedly grand ideas of "flexible custom build systems" work at all, let alone repeatedly and sustainably going forward. If you find yourself scripting maven, you're doing something wrong. Nevertheless it is still possible. Contrary to popular belief maven also does NOT *require* source code organized in a predefined manner, or "always downloads the whole internet" or other such nonsense. My conservative guess is that >90% of the people who bitch and moan about it never read the documentation or bothered to understand the behaviour. Some default settings might be arguably considered naive or unfortunate, though these might as well fall into the "lessons learned" category and can be easily adjusted. Maven is not a build tool like ant or, god help us all, make. If you are unclear of the concepts and ideas then I suggest to take the time to read the "definitive guide" at: http://books.sonatype.com/maven-book/index.html -h
