On 3/23/12 6:47 AM, Matthias-Christian Ott wrote:
Hi,
I have been assigned to a legacy Java project, which uses several messed
up Ant buildfiles. I'm going to replace or clean up the build system as
part of project maintainance.
I read that Maven (similar to other language-specific package
management software) has been a problem for Debian for a long time
and that Debian struggles with the general Java software packaging
mentality which often ignores system wide package managers. One of the
goals for the project is to make software packaging and distribution
easier and automatic. Gentoo and Fedora seem to support Maven and Ant,
but prefer Ant. Is that also true for Debian? If so, are there any
preferred build target naming conventions, like [1]?
Regards,
Matthias-Christian
[1] https://wiki.apache.org/ant/TheElementsOfAntStyle
I can tell you that of all the projects I have worked with for years and
all those my friends work with, I have yet to find anyone who uses the
Maven that is packaged with a distribution. The common practice is to
have Ant + Ivy, Maven, or Gradle + Ivy using a repository outside the OS
package management system's own packages. Coupling a Java project to
using the Java libraries packaged with the current version of your
operating system's offerings is generally avoided, as you invariably
need a library or a version of a library that is not available.
Maven is pretty handy when you lay out your project using the
conventions that Maven chooses, but getting used to Maven's Build
Lifecycle[0] is often an adjustment. I often prefer Ant + Ivy, mostly
because Ant is so straightforward and Ivy gives me the transitive
dependency management that was always Maven's one cool feature which
made people put up with the build lifecycle hassle and the need to
create Maven plugins for even the most trivial tasks at times. You can
google "maven versus ant" to see a number of writeups about the
tradeoffs between those choices.
[0] -
http://maven.apache.org/guides/introduction/introduction-to-the-lifecycle.html
Regards,
--
Barry Hawkins
All Things Computed
email: ba...@alltc.com
twitter: barryhawkins
blog: http://barryhawkins.com/blog
site: http://alltc.com
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