Re: Lets make recursive dependencies obvious rather than hidden. [was Re: Proposal to remove processing of geronimo-service.xml files in dependencies]

[Dain Sundstrom]

I dislike this because it requires intimate knowledge of the dependency 
archive.  For example, if you are using a module and it decides to use 
nested dependencies then you will have to modify all plans.

As we have seen with war archives, users just want a single file that 
Just Works (sm).

-dain
On Dec 27, 2004, at 12:08 PM, David Jencks wrote:
I think I am completely failing to communicate my concern.  Perhaps 
the problem is that the subject header is now completely misleading.

I agree 100% that the external dependency list, now called 
geronimo-service.xml, is a good idea and should be kept under some 
name and syntax, and that we should spiff up the maven stuff so it 
gets its dependency versions set during the build.  I don't care what 
we name it.

What I would like is that by looking at the top level plan containing 
gbean instance definitions, you can easily see whether a dependency is 
a plain jar or if it contains more information such as a 
geronimo-service.xml.  I suggested some syntax for this:

<dependency>
  <uri>foo/jars/foo-1.0.jar</uri>
  <pom>foo/poms/geronimo-service.xml</pom>
</dependency>
for external dependency lists or
<dependency>
  <uri>foo/jars/foo-1.0.jar</uri>
  <embedded-pom/>
</dependency>
Then, including just
<dependency>
  <uri>foo/jars/foo-1.0.jar</uri>
</dependency>
would result in an embedded dependency list being ignored.
Obviously, pom is the wrong name, but I haven't figured out a better 
one.

thanks
david jencks