On Dec 8, 2006, at 6:41 PM, Prasad Kashyap wrote:
... At this point... and ya, I may be in a
bad mood now... I don't think that mvn is an appropriate tool for
building production quality products... period.
I hear ye. I share the pain. But I fear the alternative - spending
considerable time migrating to another build system.
Ya, I know... I'm not suggesting that we change any time soon. But I
do fear that there is going to be some serious ongoing pain.
When you return from your bad mood to your jolly good ole' self again,
I dunno... I'm jaded now... good ole jolly jason was eaten by the big
angry maven monster... :-P
can you please shed more light on what it would take to have this
*ONE* repo; it's pros and cons and such..
I've sent a few emails about this in the past. Major hurtles to this
are going to be sysadmin/network overheads, ASF infra politics, and
of course keeping the artifacts in sync. There are just way to many
things that need to get downloaded, making the window for problems
really quite massive.
I'm still trying to figure out how to effectively workaround this
problem for an open community... in a corporate setting this is a no
brainer, setup a machine, back it up, setup proximity or maven-proxy
to aggregate remote repos, then create a few local repos backed by
svn to hold custom artifacts or specific versions to help reduce risk
incurred by remote artifact stability. Then each project just lists
that one repo.
This works well, but due to the way maven works, other dependencies
may list repos, which will then get picked up and used for artifacts
selection, which tends to pollute the sanity and stability, but
usually not too much. But its yet another flaw in maven's
architecture which while its flexible and easy for smaller projects,
its nearly impossible to make any sort of assurances for larger more
complicated projects. Actually even for smaller ones it makes it
very very difficult to ensure build stability over the life of the
project (past build repeatability and assumed future compatibility,
as at any time someone could publish a plugin or artifact which
completely breaks your build, often times requiring days to debug why).
The only way around this is to have total ownership of imported build
artifacts and an effective paper trail for changes (ie svn change logs).
While maven has made many things simpler... it really has made it a
lot harder to implement stable, reliable and durable builds. :-(
Anyways, all I can really think of to step around this problem, is to
checkin all of the artifacts which are needed into svn, configure the
build to use a checkout of that repo for its local and then always
run offline. And periodically update the svn repo from remotes as
well as manage some artifacts by hand. Essentially removing any
remoteness from Maven, which is IMO key to making builds stable,
reliable and durable.
Svn has all the artifacts needed, so svn co will get you the right
bits, svn up will make sure its the latest, so no need to keep making
all those network calls to check for artifacts, which will speed the
build up dramatically. Svn will always have a trail of who changed
what when which can be easily correlated to build failures using a CI
tool. Mysterious dependency download, metadata corruption, bad
network connections basically go a way from the list of normal
problems we run into. The repository gets labeled when the software
gets labeled, so you can *always* go back in time, checkout an old
release and build it... and have a very, very, very high chance that
it will work with no fuss, only things which may break it would be
environment related (deep windows folder, wrong jdk version, missing
heap settings, etc).
Dunno if there are other options really... maybe... but I can't think
of it at the moment.
I think the mvn plugin system is good, getting better once they fix
some of the annoying bugs... and even better once they document the
apis more. Wish the dang pom was not so verbose... or need to carry
version details into each and every pom... but those are all minor.
The major issue is the remote repo. Once you eliminate that, then
mvn starts to look a whole lot more attractive for serious production
builds.
--jason
