Maven's declarative nature may be its second greatest strength, following platform independence and preceding the rich plugin collection.
The lack of any _dependency_ driven flow below the module level -- apparently typically solved by throwing more modules into the mix just to achieve sequencing, or trying to use the fixed sequencing of the stages -- may be its greatest weakness. Note that I'm still having to play games with when site runs; site depends on code in the package, and the download zipfiles depend upon site. Alex grants that if you're pushing declarative build design as a Maven advantage, _make_ beat you the punch by about half a century, and is fully dependency driven; its major downsides are that it doesn't have platform independence and isn't new and sexy and markup language based. I really expected Maven to handle that better. So my half-thought is what it would take to change from stages to dependencies, and how much of the Maven design would have to be thrown out the window to achieve it... or at least to draft a prototype that could leverage what's already been done. Maven does beat Ant. And it has the plugin tooling and auto-fetch from libraries. But the lack of dependency-driven execution Bothers me. Vlad favors Gradle. I don't know if Gradle is better, worse, or just different, but from what he's said it sounds like it does have the ability to update just what it must, as make did, and to handle sequences that don't match the predefined stage sequences. Maybe it's time to consider crossbreeding. I may change my mind after further exposure to Maven, but that's my reaction to what I've seen of it so far and how much help I needed to understand its quirks. -- /_ Joe Kesselman (he/him/his) -/ _) My Alexa skill for New Music/New Sounds fans: / https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09WJ3H657/ Caveat: Opinionated old geezer with overcompensated writer's block. May be redundant, verbose, prolix, sesquipedalian, didactic, officious, or redundant. ________________________________ From: Gary Gregory <garydgreg...@gmail.com> Sent: Sunday, November 19, 2023 5:55:40 PM To: Maven Users List <users@maven.apache.org> Subject: Re: Pure curiosity You can get an idea by downloading the source zip file from https://maven.apache.org/download.cgi and and counting something like Java source files or kilobytes' worth of Java files, or LoCs... FWIW, I see Gradle mentioned here and there in our issues. Using Gradlebwould be a huge mistake IMO... I really don't like Gradle. Maven has its quirks, sure, but if you implement a build using Maven's philosophy of "configuration by exception", you end up with a nice easy to maintain build. Gary On Sun, Nov 19, 2023, 5:39 PM Joseph Kesselman <kesh...@alum.mit.edu> wrote: > How large is the actual Maven core application itself, without even the > "standard" plugins? > > (I've got half an idea and am trying to guess how much work it would be to > prototype something.) > > -- > /_ Joe Kesselman (he/him/his) > -/ _) My Alexa skill for New Music/New Sounds fans: > / https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09WJ3H657/ > > Caveat: Opinionated old geezer with overcompensated writer's block. May be > redundant, verbose, prolix, sesquipedalian, didactic, officious, or > redundant. >
