Stephen Colebourne wrote:
>>Hate to be an "old fart" here but was ant really all that bad?
Well it is a question isn't it? I suppose this is a flame thread, but I
have to ask, have we over the last two years or so actually got the
benefits that maven promised? And do we believe that maven2 will help?
Although I haven't used it all that much yet, it promises to fix most of
the thing that were hard/difficult in Maven 1.
When I think of maven, I see the POM as a good idea, raising the
abstraction level. The problem has always been what it does with the
POM. I have a feeling that maven should have just been a set of ant
tasks that used the POM for info. Anyway, that design wasn't chosen.
So what works well with maven? Well the end result site can be quite
reasonable. You still have to put in effort though, to fix
navigation.xml, cvs-usage.xml, issue-tracking.xml, add decent links to
each of the reports, manage the history of javadocs...
There seems to be some sort of templating feature in Maven 2 that could
take the misery out of keeping copies of beefed-up cvs-usage.xml files
for every component.
Building has always seemed to be a nightmare though. I have no faith
that the jar or dist built by maven is the jar/dist that I want (I
always want something non-standard). And one output jar per project is
just crazy (see collections-testframework for example). And we still
don't have a cast-iron way to build a 1.2 compatible release using maven.
Agreed.
So, are we holding on to maven because we feel we should? Are the
claimed benfits really there? And if I'm already using ant for releases,
why shouldn't we do as Hen suggests and generate our reports outside
maven too?
In my opinion, site generation and dependency management is where the
benefit of Maven is. There are ant-tasks available that makes use of
Maven's dependency management. I've been meaning to try them out, but
haven't found the time...
We really should start looking at Maven 2 for commons sites. I have
started to fiddle with a pom.xml for commons-build, but it's far from
finished. Need to rework the whole navigation stuff, since it has
changed. Not sure how the current setup with entities is supposed to
work. Are the entities supposed to be used in the (common) commons site
or in each component's site or both?
--
Dennis Lundberg
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