On Thu, Aug 26, 2010 at 10:59 AM, Sim IJskes - QCG <[email protected]> wrote: > On 08/26/2010 10:37 AM, Patrick Wright wrote: >> >> A big advantage of Maven is that all the major Java editors all allow >> you to open a project by opening a POM file. All resources, paths, >> etc. are immediately configured. This is a big plus for people who >> want to explore the code and possibly contribute. Dependency >> management is also much more straightforward using Maven. > > I dont see a problem with dependency management with the current situation. > If you create a dependency, you should include the stuff you depend on. A > pom file for the final result to use river as a maven dependency should > cause no problems. But we should differentiate between offering a set of > jars with a pom file, and using it for building river altogether.
The topic here is building River using Maven (not publishing River artifacts for a release; that's a separate topic). It is possible, though not very common as far as I know, to use Maven but include third-party libraries in the project source tree (for example in /lib) and configure Maven to look there for the files, instead of pulling them from a repository. That gives you the utmost security in rebuilding older versions of the project. I haven't seen this be necessary though in the Maven projects I've been working with. It seems more common to rely on the dependency mechanism for third-party dependencies. I've seen a great advantage to having Maven POM files available for open source projects. If they are correctly written (and that's not that hard), you get started with the project by pointing your editor to the POM file. Done. Or you go to the command line and type mvn package or mvn test. Done. This makes the project much more friendly to newcomers and drive-by hackers, IMO. I have some free time coming up and maybe I'll just put my money where my mouth is and post one or more POMs for River to see what people think. Regards Patrick
