John Casey wrote:
being the BSD's and Debians of the world. The problem with BSD is that they don't even port the JVM quickly enough to be considered relevant.
The BSDs are not supported by Sun.
Sun's JDK code is not open source, so they are not allowed to just take it, port it and distribute it. Read the fine license of Sun's source code releases ;)
I'll skip the flame-fest invitation of how relevant BSDs are. It doesn't matter if they are relevant to you, it matters if they are relevant to their users ;) If you don't consider them to be relevant, Maven can hardly claim to be truely 'cross-platform and just works out of the box'. More like 'cross-platform and just works out of the box (on a few selected platforms)' ;)
Which is what I've been saying all along ;)
If we tried to program strictly for BSD, we'd all still be stuck on JDK 1.3. As for Debian, from what I've heard it's a nice system, but you can't make sweeping, generalized statements about package managers when this is nearly the only relevant example. In short, the result of my experience with dependency management in most package management software has been increased blood pressure and (I'm sure) a shortened life span. Obviously, I'm no expert, but I believe I can take a fair crack at representing the masses. ;)
Package management is not meant as a passtime for the masses, but to make the work easier for system administrators. ;)
Debian is not the only nice system out there. I've heard very nice things about gentoo's 'source only' package management, for example.
But this is not the proper forum to discuss package management systems. The thread is about using maven for package management, and I'm arguing that it's not suited for it.
Is maven the right thing to use for managing native code? Probably not,
at least by itself.
Definitely not. It may be O.K. for whatever environment Maven developers decide to use, but it would fail horribly on others.
Fetch GNU libtool, read the sources, and weep ;) Even building dynamic libraries in C and C++ is very painful and platform specific, don't get me started about managing different versions of dynamic native libraries on the same system. People are building Linux distributions for embedded systems that use uClibc insted of GNU libc. Maven would need to host all possible combinations of native-library * compiler-version * libc-type * libc-version and that's just for starters. I haven't even mentioned the different configuration flags available for native libraries at compile time. Down that centralized path lies insanity. ;)
Does it have an appreciable advantage for most users over 99% of the
dependency management field? OH, Hell yes.
When 99% of the field has no dependency management at all (i.e. Windows), that's hardly that surprising, isn't it ? ;)
I'd be interested in what Maven can offer that a native package manager (say dpkg) can not.
cheers, dalibor topic
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