* Henri Yandell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [2005-10-01 02:11]:
> (Note: Not a BSF committer, just a generic Jakarta committer; not a
> maven committer either, just wanting to try and show why people might
> think otherwise)
>
> On 9/25/05, Alan Gutierrez <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > Once a project goes to Maven, there is an enormous barrier to
> > entry for those developers, like myself, who are not going to
> > put up with it. I don't need a PMD report every time I change a
> > line of code.
> When I check a project out and see it uses Ant, I wave my hands in
> despair. Yet another custom piece of hackery to wade through before I
> understand what is going on. Okay, bombastically said, but it's a
> serious point, Maven equals standardisation equals easy-to-understand.
> I'm assuming you were taking poetic licence, but you don't get a
> PMD report every time you change code. When compiling, all Maven
> does is force your unit tests to run every time instead of
> allowing you to compile separately.
[snip]
That was a very good rebuttal. I'm hearing that for a J2EE
project, a lot of people like Maven. I'm also finding that a lot
of people dislike Maven, but everyone seems to dislike it for
different reasons.
I'm finding that a lot of people are frustrated with Maven, and
I feel that Ant is better because it is simplier, and because
you can read through it if it is written well.
All the points you make are reasonable. The problem with build
configuration is that it is a tedious problem to try to solve.
You're dealing with lots of ingrats (such as myself), and lots
of egos. Did you read the "Bicycle Shed" article that was
attached to the Subversion project? Everyone has an opinion on
source control, build configuration, and everyone is going to
share their opinion.
That said..
I think the adherence to standard here has been something of a
mistake, though. If Ant is so awful that we need Maven, why are
we basing Maven on Ant?
The problem with Ant, is that it is not trivial to extend, and
when you do something to make it trivial to extends, like use
Rhino, people scream at you for violating the lovely "standard".
This is a place where Javans need to be a bit more flexible, not
less, I think, because source distribution is key to *open*
source, and we are woefully lacking in source management tools.
We do not have CPAN, yet, by the way. Not by a long shot. No
searching, no documentation browsing, not even a README, no
transtive deps, no source (yikes!), and Saxon is still at 6.5.3.
Again. This is not a rant. I'm not getting all Hani about it.
It seems like we are working against javac here, creating a
system as complex as GNU configure, to solve a problem that
should not exist.
Cheers.
--
Alan Gutierrez - [EMAIL PROTECTED] - http://engrm.com/blogometer/
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