On 14 October 2010 22:56, Kenneth McDonald <kenneth.m.mcdon...@sbcglobal.net> wrote: >>> Hi Wayne, I'll post one more response to your well-thought-out question. >>> >>> Here is the pom file I'm currently using: >>> >>> and just so you don't have to scroll all the way to the bottom to see the >>> comments, I'll put them here :-) >>> >>> - Is there _anything_ in the structure of this file which leads me to an >>> "aha, I understand what the major >>> and minor parts of the file are all about" moment? >>> >>> - Does the file get across what it means both concisely and clearly? >>> >>> - Is the syntax of the file for the convenience of the programmer, or the >>> convenience of the tools >>> that process it? >>> >>> - Could someone well-versed in programming, but without an understanding of >>> maven, make at >>> least some sense of this file? >>> >>> IMHO, the answers are no, no, for the convenience of the tools, and no. In >>> terms of readability, >>> this file (and all pom files I've seen) are simply disasters. In terms of >>> semantics--OK, pretty good. >>> In terms of usability, what a piece of garbage! >> >> But why would you ever see this? >> Doesn't your IDE support Maven? > > I use IntelliJ IDEA, one of the better thought of IDEs. Regardless, it makes > me look at the pom as xml. But > even that begs the question.
IntelliJ kicks ass >> There is no reason why any of my guys would ever look at this as XML. >> We use Eclipse/STS as an IDE and this simple POM would never require anyone >> to do anything in XML. >> >> Hand editing POMs is not a reasonable thing to do in 2010 unless you are >> debugging Maven and want to break a POM to see what Maven does. >> > I agree. Hand editing POMs is not reasonable because POMs are not amenable to > hand editing. That's a problem > of the POM format, not of the concept of hand editing. I routinely edit my pom's by hand using vi, I do not feel any major pain so doing, and I have some rather complex pom's at that... I have one pom that starts two jetty, selenium, a derby database, some other odds and sods and runs integration tests with failsafe... ok ok ok so i'm a pmc, but still it's no big deal working with the pom as is > >> You need to look at parent POMs to get rid of the clutter: >> >> This goes in the project parent POM so you don't put it in a POM that >> generates an artifact: > > That may be the case (and is something that is nonobvious from reading basic > maven docs), but... >> >> <developers> >> <developer> >> <id>kmcdonald</id> >> <name>Kenneth McDonald</name> >> <email>ykkenmcd [at] gmail com</email> >> </developer> >> </developers> >> >> <licenses> >> <license> >> <name>Lesser General Public License (LGPL)</name> >> <url>http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/lesser.txt</url> >> <distribution>repo</distribution> >> </license> >> </licenses> >> > developers = [{id: "kmcdonald", name: "Kenneth McDonald", email: "ykkenmcd > [at] gmail com"}] > > licenses = [ > { > name: "Lesser General Public License (LGPL)", > url: "http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/lesser.txt"; > distribution: "repo" > } > ] > > That's ten lines of code vs. fifteen, and the ten lines are _much_ more > readable. And I could've compressed those ten lines further without much > effort. C'mon, people, where's your sense of proportion? The syntax I've used > is pretty Pythonic (not sure if it's exactly that since I've used > Perl/Python/JavaScript so interchangeably), but it's been around for a _LONG_ > time. Much longer than Maven has been using--Gaggh--XML. Exactly WHAT is the > problem with using a syntax that is: > > a) easily parsed > b) easily read > c) easily written > > Oh, and while I'm at it, I'll mention another pet peeve of XML: The idea that > things should be text _unless_ they are explicitly marked as not text. This > completely flies in the face of I don't know how many years of CS, and is > simply wrong. Most of most coding constructs is control logic. It follows > that it should be easy to write the control logic, a little bit more > difficult to write the literals. Now when HTML was being designed, that was > different, because they were designing to a format whose primary purpose was > visual represention on a page. Guess what, boys and girls--we're not doing > that anymore! XML is a control format, and should make it easy to write the > control parts of the statements, and a little tougher to write the literal > parts. The fact that it doesn't do this is evidence if its almost complete > inadequacy to serve as a control language. > > ...I've edited out a lot here below for brevity. > > Cheers, > Ken > > > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscr...@maven.apache.org > For additional commands, e-mail: users-h...@maven.apache.org > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscr...@maven.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: users-h...@maven.apache.org
