On Sep 20, 2010, at 9:00 AM, Mark Miller wrote:

> 
>> (BTW, I love the "Maven is Magic" (and really any "It's magic, therefore I 
>> don't like it") reasoning for not liking it, whereby everyone complains that 
>> b/c Maven hides a bunch of details from you (i.e. it's "magic"), therefore 
>> you don't like it.  At the same time, I'm sure said person doesn't 
>> understand every last detail of, oh, I don't know: the CPU, RAM, the 
>> Compiler, the JDK, etc. and yet they have no problem using that.  In other 
>> words, we deal with abstractions all the time.  It's fine if you don't get 
>> the abstraction or don't personally find it useful, but that doesn't make 
>> the abstraction bad.) 
>> 
>> -Grant
> 
> Maven is not bad because it's magic - magic is frigging great - I want
> my software to be magic - it's bad because every 5 line program from
> some open source code/project that I have tried to build with it has
> gone on an absurd downloading spree that takes forever because it's
> getting many tiny files. This downloading spree never corresponds to the
> size of the code base I am working with, and always manages to surprise
> by the amount of time it can slurp up.

Agreed, but over time, it is lessened by the fact that you already have most 
common files/jars and furthermore, you only have one copy of them instead of 
one under every source tree.  I think, over time, you actually end up 
downloading less than with other approaches and that even includes the 
downloads one gets when Maven upgrades itself.  

I do, agree, though, that Maven makes you drink the Kool-aid and it doesn't 
play well with other conventions (although it isn't horrible when it comes to 
Ant, either).  There are plenty of days I hate Maven for what it assumes, but 
there are also many days when I love the fact that the POM describes my project 
in one clear, fairly concise, "validatable" way.

> 
> I
> still think Maven should be a downstream issue.

I don't see how it can be.  You have to be a committer to push it to the ASF 
repository for syndication on iBiblio, etc.  That being said, we really aren't 
that far from a process that we can have confidence in.

-Grant
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