Hi everyone, Thanks to all for the robust discussion!
To Ron, I apologize if my comments sounded overly critical of you in particular. I get that you are trying to help guide people in the right direction, and it is certainly good for them to question their assumptions, and to understand the Maven basics before they go creating a rat's nest of unnecessary complexity. So I completely agree with your perspective and comments. What concerns me a bit is perhaps nitpickery: sayings like "you will lose" and "Maven will win" imply that advanced or unconventional configuration cannot be done with Maven. Of course, we all know that that is not the case. But a newbie doesn't. The ideas I personally would like to see communicated are: 1) When used properly, Maven does a *lot* of heavy lifting for you—much more than Ant. 2) Most projects can be expressed concisely in a POM by following Maven conventions. Many things that required substantial configuration with Ant etc. come largely for free with Maven. 3) When you must stray from conventions and standards, that is OK—but first be sure that you really must. And be aware that by doing so, you pay a *heavy* price. (And consider giving feedback to the maintainers of the standards you didn't use, so they can be improved in the future to encompass your use case.) Unfortunately, I haven't come up with any witty slogans along these lines... Eric Kolotyluk wrote: > I think the comment "if you don't do things Maven's way, Maven will fight > you and Maven will win." is humor - not fact. Keeping your sense of humor > is always good advice when working with Maven. > For sure. The first time I saw that saying I thought it was pretty funny too, because I had already been through the learning curve and understood what it's trying to say. But regarding it being humor rather than fact: there is usually an element of truth in humor. We should keep in mind that newbies are coming in blind, with very little context. Some people, including very experienced developers, might read it more as a statement of fact or at least attitude that what they are trying to do is wrong, and conclude that Maven and/or its community is inflexible and inappropriate for their use, which is a shame, because as I said before Maven is actually extremely flexible and I think should be used whenever possible. :-) Wayne Fay wrote: > But no matter what is done along these lines, you will always have some > nontrivial percentage of the population that "doesn't have time to read all > of that" and just wants to make their build work right now. We can point > people at books all day long but they can (and do) ignore that advice. > Yep, writing good documentation is really hard! I would also add: how the docs are organized is just as important as the content itself. We each have our own threshold for reading the docs versus "just trying it" and how the documentation is laid out will affect whether we find the answers with the limited effort we expend. Regards, Curtis On Wed, Apr 18, 2012 at 12:33 PM, Wayne Fay <wayne...@gmail.com> wrote: > > The Maven site is not the most friendly place to start as a new Maven > > user but it is not the only resource. > > > > Perhaps the community should try to come to a consensus about the books > > and recommend one as the "best" starting point for a new user and one as > > the best place to find "Best Practices". > > We may need more Maven documentation like this: > http://learnpythonthehardway.org/ > > But no matter what is done along these lines, you will always have > some nontrivial percentage of the population that "doesn't have time > to read all of that" and just wants to make their build work right > now. We can point people at books all day long but they can (and do) > ignore that advice. > > The reality is that Maven has a bit of a learning curve and most > people new to it (mostly coming from Ant) will try to mold Maven to > their uses (by applying it to their existing projects and swapping Ant > config for Maven plugin config line by line) instead of leveraging the > great functionality out of the box (with zero config so long as you > stick with those pesky conventions). I'm not sure how to help people > short-circuit this learning process even WITH documentation. > > ESR's essay on asking the right questions is key to getting proper > help on this list: > http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html#goal > > Wayne > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscr...@maven.apache.org > For additional commands, e-mail: users-h...@maven.apache.org > >
