Sylvain Wallez wrote:
Reinhard Poetz wrote:
<snip/>
We have invested a lot of time into making trunk build with M2. And
don't forget that it's much more than just compiling the thing.
We have two archetypes, one deployment plugin, the documentation which
is exported using Maven, a working integration build, reports and
certainly much more. Also don't forget that releasing a Cocoon
artifact has become very simple. And one last point: If you build
Cocoon using some different build system I think that we cannot
forbear providing Maven 2 metadata files (pom.xml) because many
developers will ask for them.
I'd like to react on that last point: a POM is just XML. And if there's
a place where we know that XML is an interchange format, this is for
sure here in Cocoon-land. And we know there are plenty of solutions to
generate XML files in whatever format we want from whatever data source
we have.
There is a good thing in Maven: the repository, where people can pick up
dependencies (well, when it works) rather than copying them in their own
source control repository. This is not good for a large in-house project
where you want to control and version everything, but a good way for OSS
projects to lighten their development process.
I can't follow your argumentation here. What are you missing?
Now the problem with Maven is that, because people are interested in
that good thing, they feel obliged to use the tool where that repository
and the associated file format was born. Why should that be a
requirement? Why couldn't the POM be used/created by other tools as well?
Who or what prevents you from doing so?
With its POM and repository, Maven managed to create an amazing
dictatorship on the entire OSS Java community. That buggy tool (because
yes, it is buggy) with no clear documentation is becoming a vital part
of many projects. So vital actually, that it has endangered and damaged
some of them.
If you're refering to Cocoon as a victim damaged by Maven, I'm not sure that
this conclusion is fair. As Daniel pointed out, I think that we did a lot to
damage ourselves by having too many dependencies across our code base.
Look at what happened here: I personnaly stopped looking at the 2.2
branch after spending too much hours trying (and finally giving up)
building Cocoon with Maven. The broken 2.2 build lasted for weeks and
months. The switch to Maven is one of the reasons of me leaving the
project, even if I wasn't against it a first (I wasn't particularly
enthusiastic, but trusted the majority that wanted this move, and was
also naively caught by the hype).
I was one of the last people around here that agreed to use Maven as build tool
but in the meantime I have to say that I like it although not everything is as
perfect as I would like to see it.
Similarly, Jorg became a Maven expert,
actively participating and contributing to Maven. Very good for Maven
that earns his skills and time and kudos to him for all his efforts, but
so bad for Cocoon that lost his valuable time for more useful things.
Ant+Ivy just works, and you understand what happens in your build. It
provides dependency management, and can also use the Maven repository
(yes, XML makes things interoperable).
Converting an Ant build to an Ant+Ivy build merely means writing an
ivy.xml (or pom.xml) expressing the dependencies and changing the
<classpath> instructions so that they're build from the dependencies
artifacts that Ivy will download, rather than from e.g. "lib/*.jar". And
writing Ant tasks that mimic an artifact, deploy and release things are
not rocket science.
no, it's not but all those tedious things have to be done and I want to warn you
not to underestimate the work. I won't stop any of you to fix what *you*
consider as broken but don't expect that I will get excited about rewritting
many things (poms, archetypes, deployer, documentation) or mimicing feautres
that Maven provides out of the box or via its plugins (many reports, releasing
artifacts, etc.).
--
Reinhard Pötz Independent Consultant, Trainer & (IT)-Coach
{Software Engineering, Open Source, Web Applications, Apache Cocoon}
web(log): http://www.poetz.cc
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