On 26 Oct 2010, at 8:56 PM, Kenneth McDonald wrote:
Yeah, but a build often does not fit on a page, and I'm building
some pretty simple stuff!
To argue for the flexibity of Maven is (AFAIK) defensible. It's
power (from what little knowledge I have), likewise.
But, I'm sorry to say, the verbosity of XML is a major, major issue.
You've said that a number of times, but I haven't yet seen a solid
justification for it. For me, it's a non issue. If it doesn't fit on a
screen, I scroll down. I can scan and read if by hand if I need to,
but way more often, I validate the structure against an XSD, and the
system finds my mistakes for me. And I never see any need for this:
foo() {
.
.
.
} /* foo */
I leave my pom files to the defaults as far as possible, and that
means options aren't set. Those that are set are neatly sectioned off,
with comments if necessary to explain something that may not be
obvious to the eye.
The code is in a separate project to the archive (jar, war, etc),
which is in a separate project to the assemblies. When the pom gets
too long, it's a clear sight the project should be broken up into
smaller more manageable pieces. Sometimes these are all released
separately with different version numbers, most often they all share
the same version in a multi module project. I don't know or care,
maven-release-plugin cares about version numbers.
I get the sense that you're bitterly opposed to XML, and by extension,
anything else that uses XML, and while maven uses XML, you'll be
opposed to maven. This is not a problem maven can fix for you.
I bring you back to the simple fact of: If XML were so expressive,
why aren't most modern languages written in XML?
Because if language designers agreed on a common syntax they would
have also agreed on a common language?
You're again making a mistake that maven pom files are somehow a
"language", in the way that ant build files are.
Pom files are a hierarchical collection of facts, they are not a
sequence of instructions. XML is really good at solving this problem.
Maven is not ant.
I've looked at pages and pages of POM files, trying to learn things.
And my conclusion is that Maven was _fundamentally flawed_ in
choosing XML as its base.
They had to choose something, and the world didn't need another custom
syntax.
Regards,
Graham
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