On Thu, Sep 27, 2007 at 06:57:17PM +0200, Insitu spake thus:
> [...]
> 2. they have a hard time understanding all the "magic" behind $> mvn
> install when they are used to $> ant all or $> make all. [...]
People with experience using the conventions of other build tools are
likely to be confused by 'mvn install'. In particular, there is a
long-standing convention of providing a 'make install' target in
make-based projects, and that target actually installs the software on
the system for use by end-users (and typically requires root privileges
to succeed when building with defaults).
A user with this experience will be apprehensive about invoking:
$ mvn install
because his intuition is telling him that the action will attempt to
perform some action other than "put the artifact in the local m2 repo
where it can be accessed by other subprojects, etc".
In my opinion, 'mvn all' or 'mvn available' would have been better
choices. 'all' is ambiguous, but in a familiar way. 'available'
introduces new terminology, but is okay because it maps to a new concept
('make' and 'ant' do not have the concept of a local repository).
I'm not suggesting that the maven 2.x 'install' build life cycle phase
be renamed at this point because maven is well-enough established that
doing so would be needlessly disruptive. But, thinking back to my
pre-maven-lobotomy days, it would have been nice if it did not violate
the principle of least surprise on this point. To the extent possible,
new approaches and new tools should leverage users' existing experience
as much as possible.
-Al
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Alan D. Salewski
Software Developer
Health Market Science, Inc.
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