I'm curious... what "key maven1 features" are you referring to that
have not been completed in maven2?
--jason
On Aug 27, 2006, at 2:52 PM, Graham Leggett wrote:
Wendell Beckwith wrote:
> You're like
original band members, but it hurts to say that you all are
getting your
asses handed to you by orgs like Spring and Eclipse. There just
doing a far
better job on the dcomentation and website.
Having used maven1 for a long time (and having been blown away by
the concept of a build system that "already knew how to do stuff in
a mutually agreed way", replacing "yet another half written custom
ant script"), I decided that it was time to sell the current
project team on the idea of maven2.
The conclusion of the attempt to use maven2 is that it is simply
not finished yet. Some features taken for granted in maven1 are
missing/incomplete, and the documentation is missing/incomplete.
I think the maven2 project is showing signs of the second system
effect - maven1 was carefully and thoughtfully constructed,
documentation carefully and thoughtfully created. And - it helped
that maven1 was largely complete before people discovered the
concept of an intelligent build system.
maven2 seems to have been built with enthusiasm - but crucial
elements (like key maven1 features, and documentation) have not
been completed.
Luckily, there is no evidence of the second system effect in the
design of maven2 (IMHO of course), the problems are in the finish
of the software, meaning that fixing this means altering the focus
from new features to finishing existing ones, and completing the
documentation (as opposed to revisiting a design, or rewriting code).
The reason this is important is this:
maven1 was a complete no brainer to sell to projects. Once I had
shown people that there was no need to construct ant scripts to do
everyday tasks, maven1 "just knew" how to do things, and this was a
huge win, case closed.
On the particular project I am on now, maven1 was considered and
rejected for not supporting transitive dependencies (fair enough)
so they cooked up their own half working ant scripts, using ivy to
handle dependencies. maven2 does support transitive dependencies,
so in theory it should have been a no brainer sell, as before. But
in reality my testing the waters has uncovered a miriad of
problems, leading us to suggest that maven2 initially just be used
to generate documentation (mvn site).
I agree with comments that the documentation needs urgent work, and
I as a new user of maven2, have been trying to add what I consider
missing information from a new user point of view to JIRA (ie, what
information would have helped me use maven2, that was missing or
incomplete).
If users could channel issues causing them frustration with the
docs into concise JIRA reports "I am trying to perform task X but
the docs don't tell me how" (which needs to be done at the time,
because after you finally figured out the problem, suddenly that
JIRA report doesn't seem so urgent any more), it will go a long way
to indicate to developers where there are gaps that need filling.
Regards,
Graham
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