My current understanding is that Maven and Maven repositories are primarily used to distribute pre-compiled binaries and to build other software against these binaries. I want to build all dependencies of a project from source code.
I found that it is possible to publish source code through Maven repositories and build dependencies that provide source code via the source, dependency and build helper plugins. However, despite some technical problems (non-incremental builds, no separate .jar files), it seems this is not how Maven is normally used for. Some Linux distributions also build all software that uses Maven from source and have developed their own software to isolate Maven builds and build them only with the software which are specified as dependencies in the build specification of the package manager. Debian has dpkg helper scripts, Fedora has koji and there is also JPackage. It was somewhat difficult to integrate Maven with the respective package managers and build systems and for example FreeBSD does not compile Java software and only uses pre-compiled binaries to avoid these difficulties. For other operating systems without package managers, especially Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X, it is worse. Because all dependencies have to be bundled with and updated for each independently installed software. This is particularly problematic for security updates. It seems setting up a build service (similar to koji but platform-independent) that tracks new software versions, is aware of dependencies between projects and builds all transitive dependencies from source code with isolated Maven repositories and bundles all dependencies with the original software. In order to track dependencies it would be necessary to have adapters that watch and scrap FTP directories, RSS and atom feeds and websites for updates, import source code archives, build new releases, rebuild dependent software, flag the newly build software for testing and approval. While this is certainly not impossible, it is also not trivial. Is anyone aware of a source build system for Maven would meet the requirements or at least serve as a foundation for building such system? Regards, Matthias-Christian --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscr...@maven.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: users-h...@maven.apache.org
