Hello, I had a thought today about a potential Maven feature. Granted there are already tons of cool features being added (and too be added), so I don't mean to bring up frivolous ideas, but I think the idea is worth pondering anyway.
Maven simplifies things for project developers, but what if it also simplified things for end users? Something along the lines of a standardized install process; perhaps support for making sh/exe/jar/rpm-based installers in the long run. I don't know if the install process is generic enough to allow Maven to automate it for all projects (I've never worked with any type of install program before), but it'd be cool to provide a jar that users could execute and it'd handle setting up environment variables, prompting the user for an install location, checking for Ant & common J2EE servers if need be, informing the app of where it's installed, and other misc. things. Most of the Apache projects are developer's tools, so it may not be a concern. But it'd be cool for projects like Scarab and the like that would benefit from a dummy-ized install process. Perhaps the work Peter Lynch is doing could tie into this idea; in that if your app needs to run on a J2EE server, it could auto-install one for users who don't know better. The more I think about it, the more I think it's a frivolous idea, but I just thought I'd mention it. If I should more strongly screen the ideas I post to the list, just let me know, I don't mean to waste peoples' time. Thanks, Stephen -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
