NRYet created MDEP-876:
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Summary: Potential Improvement for Maven
Key: MDEP-876
URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/MDEP-876
Project: Maven Dependency Plugin
Issue Type: Improvement
Reporter: NRYet
Dear Maven maintainers, we are studying Maven dependency specifications and we
would like to offer several possible improvements for Maven.
(1) The scope management of Maven is complicated and hard to distinguish. Maven
maintained 6 scopes (i.e., {_}compile{_}, {_}runtime{_}, {_}provided{_},
{_}system{_}, {_}test{_}, and {_}import{_}). Compare to newer package managers
such as NPM, which only has two scopes (i.e., {_}dependencies{_},
{_}devdependencies{_}), Maven has too many types of scopes, which makes it more
difficult for users to understand. We went over all POMs on the Maven Central
(around 8M artifacts, collected in March 2022) and count the frequency of all
types of scope. Some of the scopes are rarely used. Only 0.35% of POMs in the
Maven Center used _system_ scope. Also, _system_ scope is similar to _provided_
scope, and _import_ scope can hardly be regarded as a dependency scope. We
suggest simplifying the types of scopes by merging _system_ into _provided_ and
removing {_}import{_}.
(2) In the documentation of Default Artifact Handlers
([https://maven.apache.org/ref/3.9.3/maven-core/artifact-handlers.html]),
_type_ and _classifier_ should introduce more commonly used values as their
default value to provide better examples. We found that the default values are
rarely used and are not good examples for users to understand the use of the
settings. Setting commonly used values as default can help users understand the
usage of the settings. We went over all POMs on the Maven Central (around 8M
artifacts, collected in March 2022) and count the frequency of all possible
values of classifier and type. According to our research, in {_}classifier{_},
the default values have low frequencies, including _tests_ (1.05%), _javadoc_
(0.35%), _sources_ (0.29%), and {_}client{_}(0.01%). More commonly used values
are _features_ (1.20%), _linux-x86_64_ (0.34%), and _osx-x86_64_ (0.27%). As
for type, the top default values are _pom_ (4.38%), _test-jar_ (2.85%), _war_
(1.08%) and the rest of the values are all below 0.1%. Other common examples
are _esa_ (2.53%), _zip_ (1.88%), and _xml_ (1.31%).
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