Hi all, Noel asked me to post my opinions to this thread as a result of my recent experiences with m2. Brace yourselves because I may jump around in this email :).
I don't even know how to start off. Perhaps I can say Maven is a double edged sword for me. It has been a journey developing ApacheDS with M1 then migrating to M2. Directory has been completely developed with Maven since day one. It made many things easier at first over ant but soon as the number of project modules increased and we had to do things out of the ordinary we found that it was just as verbose and sometimes harder to manage. I don't have the time to list all the pros and cons but let me generalize and say this. For the most simple of cases wrt every aspect of a project from builds to generating a website maven is great: referring to maven 2 here specifically (would never touch m1 ever again). When things get complicated or out of the ordinary where they do not fall into a prescribed Maven pattern that's when Maven starts behaving oddly. This and how SNAPSHOTs are handled are my greatest peeves. Also we still have not figured how to get some of the new site doc generation mechanisms working properly. Thinking we could use this doxia stuff for generating xdocs we have stuffed our latest doco into confluence at safehaus and still have to figure out a way to get that stuff into our repo now. It's a bit of a mess which we must solve soon. I hope things have come along far enough since my m1-m2 conversion where we can actually use these plugins effectively to rejuvinate our aging website. In the end, I feel that maven is a great idea with a poor implementation. But then again everyone thinks they can do it better don't they? I've begun to suspect that even m2 has issues like the latest problems I've had with the failing remote repositories. Maven just has not been the same since codehaus/maven.org went down. I've already made the mistake of pushing maven on the pro ant Felix people and unofficially they're not too happy with that and I feel responsible. Not saying you guys should not use maven tho. However I think if you have a pre-existing project built on ant and you're comfortable I'd stick with that. If you're starting a new project and need to get things up and running fast maven goes a long way. Sorry for not giving more concrete examples, also I hope my love hate afair does not offend any of my good maven friends. I'd probably be complaining and loving Ant just as much if that's what I was using today. Alex --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]