I work on a pretty large project that uses Ant for builds. We're doing some research on converting to Maven. I'd like to describe some of the elements of our situation, hopefully to find some conceptual "cookbook" strategies for those aspects.
The "application" consists of the aggregation of several (10-20) separate SVN/Eclipse projects on a particular branch. Sometimes a project is used on the branch, sometimes on the trunk. The "build", when spawned from one of those projects expects the other projects to exist with expected names in peer directories (like "../module"). In order to complete a build of the entire application, a developer has to check out all of the projects required for the build, even if they only do work in one of them. The plans for a particular release define which projects will be on the branch, and which on the trunk. Although the deployment unit of the application is an EAR, the present build process uses a vendor-specific assembly mechanism to produce the EAR modules. We're examining how/whether we can simplify that part to be more conventional, but we may have to just figure out how to integrate more closely with that mechanism so we can control it, instead of replacing it. Developers use Eclipse on Windows, although the official build and deployment is on Unix/Solaris. Developers would likely use the m2eclipse plugin in Eclipse. One thing that I'm particularly looking forward to is the ability to just have to check out a single project from SVN in order to build the entire application, as I'm hoping it can somehow know to pull subproject builds from the repo instead of expecting to build the source locally. I'm not certain exactly how that will work, but I believe that should be an expected benefit of this conversion. I know I've left out a lot of specific details of our environment, but can you enumerate specific strategies and steps we should be examining?
