My 2c... Maven is pretty much incompatible with some of the standards of release engineering, namely repeatable builds. It tries to do pretty much the same job that apt does under debian and ubuntu and is therefore not terribly useful in that environment. All the mavenistas I've talked to have no good answer to that, except perhaps for setting up local repositories to do what you need.
Another approach that might be worth considering is using ivy instead of maven per se. There is a lot more control that way, and most of the engineers familiar with both approaches prefer ivy, if it's an option. Karl -----Original Message----- From: ext Grant Ingersoll [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Monday, September 20, 2010 9:22 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: discussion about release frequency. 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 --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected] --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
