Guys, These build issues are really of our own "Choosing".
When a project is started, we can point maven to repositories of our choice, or download all the dependencies manually, build a maven repository ourself, and then manage the updates of that repository, so that we know of every change made to it. The reason the maven repository is so useful is because it communicates to anyone who wants to build the project what the dependencies are and where they can get them. So if we want control we can have it, for both plugin repositories and source repositories, right at the start of the project and thereafter. If were using Ant - we'd have to tell everyone wanting to do a build where to find the dependencies... setup the class path, etc. etc. etc. and we could even have the ant script download and setup a custom repository and classpath, but then we all of a sudden have Maven. If Maven had the checksum validation Emmanuel mentioned when we listed ways to lock down the build process, that's as good as it gets as far as validating and using dependencies and plugins goes. If only we had a plugin that read the parent pom and all the module poms, analyze them, and tell us where we used the same dependency, but different version, alerted us whenenver a plugin/dependencies checksum changed without a version change, and created a report detailing all of the automatically updated plugins / dependencies - Bravo! We would be in primo condition because the build be intelligent, and tell us when something unexpected were about to happen, or when something could go awry due to the configuration of maven. So theres obviously some room for improvement, but Maven is a brilliant piece of work, and those improvements are easy to do with Maven. We just need some "Summer of Code" guys. Anyone got connections? OK OK OK - I'll shatt up now and get to work on analyzing where to apply our currently known solutions. Cheers, - Ole __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com
