Jason V,
Copying you for your feedback and awareness.
On Dec 8, 2006, at 6:06 PM, Jason Dillon wrote:
Maven does not behave well with a mix of default and legacy repos.
I have gone through and moved all legacy repos only to the modules
where they are used, and in some cases imported a module-local repo
to hold those artifacts so that the build does not need to include
a legacy repo. A few weeks ago I finally removed all the legacy
repos.... and now they are starting to creep back in.
Specifically the java.net repo, which is a legacy repo for jstl
muck, was added. Something needs to be done about this, so this
repo can be moved out of the project root, or removed altogether.
The addition of the legacy repo is known to cause problems with
SNAPSHOT resolution, and can get itself into a state with local
metadata what other artifacts will start to resolve in very, very,
very strange ways. So... don't use them.
This is compounded even more by the poor network connectivity (and
maybe connection limiting) done by the java.net repo, which is
causing builds to timeout all over the place.
* * *
Basically... maven remote repos suck ass... and should be limited
in use as much as possible if we want a stable and repeatable build
for any of our projects.
In a corporate environment, this problem is easily solved by
managing a local repo which has copies of all of the artifacts
which are required to build, often times stored in version control
and labeled with project using it.
If we are going to continue to use Maven (which I'm starting to
really wonder if it is worth it), then we really need to address
this problem... otherwise it will be an ongoing head-ache for the
foreseeable future... and really builds will never reach any level
of stability and will almost never have any ability to be reproduced.
Ugh, I've already spent so many hours debugging other peoples
reported issues, which most of the time end up resolve to problems
with Maven. I've been away for a little bit working on build
automation and in the few weeks I'm gone the build system has
already regressed in a few areas, and IMO its well on its way to
becoming out of control again while quickly. I am starting to
believe that Maven promotes that chaos, especially so for larger
projects. I also believe that Maven promotes build instability,
where at times someone might change some dependency which could
completely hose our build with out anyone really knowing why or
having any paper trail (change logs) to debug it.
IMO... the *ONLY* way to resolve these issues with Maven it so have
*ONE* repository which holds all artifacts used by our projects,
and have that repository under SVN control.
So, for this example of jstl on java.net, those artifacts would be
checked into the *ONE* repository and life goes on, no new pom
config to configure a new repo, no side-effects of poor network
connectivity to remote repositories, no strange behavior due to
legacy vs. default layout metadata muck.
If we were using Ant, then we would have needed to implement
something like this already. Though its more cumbersome with Maven
since most of the crap that is downloaded is for Maven itself, not
for our dependencies, our dependencies are much, much, much easier
to manage than the stew of jars required to make Maven and its
horde of plugins work.
The more I use Maven, the more I dislike it... and I don't really
see a light at the end of the tunnel either... mvn is almost as
slow moving as Geronimo has been for the past year, so not sure how
viable it will be as a build tool for the future if they do not
provide more bug fixes sooner and faster. 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.
--jason
Matt Hogstrom
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
