On 11 Sep 2012, at 7:22 PM, Curtis Rueden wrote: >> Just let a few juniors touch the build and you are doomed pretty quickly. > > I agree, and would generalize this statement to any build system I've ever > designed or worked with: shell scripts, Makefiles, Ant, Maven... it doesn't > matter. A build is a very finicky thing, especially for medium-to-large > projects, and increasingly so as it adds gravy to the build process.
A finicky build is a symptom of poor design, and if your design is poor no tool, unit test, CI, package, strategy or methodology is going to compensate for it. Discipline is the art of knowing why not to do something, and is a difficult thing to teach. There is a tremendous amount of waste that is perpetrated in software engineering, software is built to be disposable, with very short shelf lives. Maven challenges this trend by encouraging convention, repeatability, and code longevity, and this is a very good thing. Regards, Graham --
smime.p7s
Description: S/MIME cryptographic signature
