Hi Wayne, On 20/04/2008, at 1:35 AM, Wayne Fay wrote:
You also need to quite simply understand that Maven is not Ant (!). While there are some similarities in the two (they both build Java code), there are far more dissimilarities.
I do understand this actually ... and from what I've seen so far I'm liking what maven has to offer (especially all the out-of-the-box stuff that comes for free - which a little hunting).
Maven has certain beliefs based on best practices about how builds should be organized and performed. One of those best practices is "jars shouldn't go into SCM". So, you won't find a lot of support for this "feature" in Maven.
Fair enough.
In general, Maven is less flexible than Ant. For example, Maven expects a certain project structure for your code. While you can adjust (through configuration) the location of source code etc, it makes things a little more complex and increases the size of your pom, plus you may run into issues with certain plugins etc.
I'm quite a fan of conventions actually... but obviously there's a mind-shift that I needed to grapple with and have questions answered... [1]
If you are used to and require a large amount of flexibility in your builds, then please stick with Ant. Those of us who have migrated to Maven generally believe we are better off as a result, but there is a transition period and the mindset is a bit different.
Yep. I'm getting there.
I'm also curious -- why are you moving to Maven for this particular project?
Because I, personally, was fed up with ant. For some of the simplest things I had to write my own plugin to achieve what should just work - but even then, for the particular environment I'm working in, it was too system dependent (e.g., on external configs etc... long story). So I started looking at maven slowly on the side at first (as obviously there's a bit of reading to do in order to understand the thing and so forth). In the end I liked what I saw and quite quickly saw the potential for less pain + lots of extras ;-)
Was a mandate handed down from someone above you, or did a customer ask for it, or was it simply personal interest? You mention that you have no ability to create a shared repo etc, so I wonder where all this is coming from...
[1] Yeah, my questions were really in anticipation of questions that I know will come from up the chain, so to speak. "Why can't we just put them in subversion?! etc etc" I could go on... but essentially I need to have enough good reasons for moving in another direction.
With a better understanding now of how to create a repository, it turns out I might very well be able to set up a shared one after all. I'm thinking that I could maybe set up the remote one as a mirror of a custom repo on my local system (at first) and rsync the two when needed. The pom could reference the remote repo but perhaps in my settings.xml file I could override the location to point to my local copy when offline(?)
Any suggestions on this? with regards, -- Lachlan Deck --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
