Greetings, On Thu, Dec 22, 2011 at 5:34 AM, Deepesh Garg <deepes...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 1) Have a new packaging type which indicate that this is an installable > application. Pom file for such apps can include things like description, > display name, icon file, location to put application launchers, type of > application (desktop app, mobile app, online app(?), GUI based/command line > etc).. > Please, I beg of you, do not create yet another installation format. Before you do this, justify not using RPM/DEB or MSI, whichever applies for your target environments. All of which, yes even MSI, are far better than anything you are likely to create. 2) Create a maven goal to search configured repositories using criteria > specified in options (packaging type, artifact id, wildcard text search in > description etc). This function is useful on its own and in this case can > be used to search installable applications in repository. > This is totally outside the scope of Maven, and frankly I don't really foresee it as being generally useful in any way. Who wants to type out "" mvn package:search -Dpackage=rpm -Ddescription=\*angry\ birds\* "" when they can just fire up a new chromium tab and Google search it? > 3) Create a maven goal to install app. This will read pom description and > create application icons etc (this function will depend on platform and > will do whatever is required for current platform. Like for Linux it can > create .desktop files in specific directories or for Windows it can create > shortcuts in start menu.). This goal can also generate command line to > launch the application including all dependencies in classpath. This way > maven itself will not be required to launch the app but will still use > repository (as suggested by Brett). > Again, please don't do this! There are already great tools to manage packages, see my response to 1) above, then read the manual for yum/apt-get and whatever M$ has for MSI files. Again, all of which, yes even MSI, are far better than anything you are likely to create. > 4) Once the command line tools are available, a nice GUI wrapper can be > provided to search repositories for installable apps and install and > uninstall apps. > The tools to do this already exist. See the GUI front ends for all the tools I already mentioned for further reference. > This way maven repositories can also serve the function of app store and I > think it won't require too much effort as all the hard work is already > done. > Allowing a Maven Repository Manager (MRM) to perform as a target RPM/DEB repository, or MSI storage shed, is a positive thing. Unfortunately, that isn't what you describe though, you keep saying a Maven repository, which isn't quite the same thing. At least 1 MRM already has the ability to do this: https://code.google.com/p/nexus-yum-plugin/ -Jesse -- There are 10 types of people in this world, those that can read binary and those that can not.
