El mié, 23-04-2008 a las 17:53 +0100, Ian Boston escribió: > I was wondering after the recent rapid changes in the build, how much > ' stomach ' people had for sorting out the dependency and plugin > management in the build to bring it more inline with something like > http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/jackrabbit/trunk/pom.xm
<rant> I have vetoed maven in all the occasions I have had (and got ignored most of the times just because it was "cool and what everyone was using") because of several reasons: - bad documentation and unstable/changing features/behaviors - transparent download of "thingies" (I don't know or care what) that makes it difficult to work offline without having to remember strange switches - transparent download of dependencies that makes it difficult to assess dependencies (IMO an esencial part of Software Engineering, and something that should never be abstracted away) - very stateful under the hood (oh, you just remove the repository directory / oh, you just reboot windows ...) - a tool that uses "install" just for storing things for internal use is crearly self-centered, not task or user centered - extreme verbosity for useless information and silence about important things, i.e., it talks a lot about what it does, but nothing about what I do with it, something that always irritate me a lot. - ugly XML and confusing declarative stuff, something shared with ant - unnatural targets, where the default is always exactly what you don't want (it remembers me wordperfect on this one) - mostly always can't deal properly with dependencies, requiring "clean" quite often - it is very resource heavy, compare with make or ant - it is written in java, a proprietary language with no legal OS implementation that the ASF is having problems to turn into free software because of nasty business practices (breach of contract) by Sun Microsystems, and that I think will break in the same way as OpenSolaris at the first governance conflict because of Sun's predatory practices of late. This means that a pure free shindig install, using the PHP code for the server, will still need to use java or duplicate the build system. </rant> I have been learning to tolerate it as a bare user, as "it is cool and what everybody else uses" but I will never dig into it, use it in any project where I can avoid it, or help making maven builds as a form of civil resistance, much like when I abandoned windows for linux in 2000. So don't count on me on this one. I'll just use, and bitch about, whatever other people sets there. :) So please, do it and make mvn the most invisible part of the project if possible. :) Having like 70% of the resources of the project going to trying to deal with maven for a couple of weeks just to do a simple restructuring of the build system is wasteful. Regards Santiago > > I am happy to do a patch, and I don't think it would change the > structure of the build, but it might reduce the volume of XML in the > child poms. > > I am also happy to wait, or not do it if the core team don't want it. > Ian > Go for it and save us from the pain. :) > > -- Santiago Gala http://memojo.com/~sgala/blog/
