On Feb 12, 2008, at 9:30 AM, Dave wrote:
On Feb 12, 2008 11:41 AM, David Jencks <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I think I'm noticing something here. There are several people who
are not (yet) major contributors to roller asking for a maven build
since they find the current ant build a major impediment to
understanding the project and working on it, and there are several
people who are thoroughly familiar with the current ant build who are
saying they are familiar with the current ant build and it works.
Two of the people who want maven have offered to create the maven
build (and one has done so within the limits of not moving anything).
This goes along with my general observation that ant is good if you
want to keep your project private and unrelated to other software or
new contributors and maven is good if you want your project to have
good relations with other projects, both as a consumer of
dependencies such as spec jars and as a supplier of parts such as
roller to the geronimo roller plugin.
One of the biggest reasons I haven't found the time to propose a
patch for the new security stuff (which I consider seriously flawed)
is the pain of trying to understand how parts of the project are
interrelated. This is just not a problem with a reasonably well laid
out maven project.
Maybe so and maybe not, but if you think the reason I don't see value
in Maven is because I want to keep Roller a "private" project and have
bad relations with other projects then you are wrong. I must say, I
find that insinuation a little insulting.
I could certainly have put that better. I didn't mean to imply
anything about your intentions and not necessarily anything about
roller in particular. However I've gotten the impression from the
projects I follow that projects using ant tend to have a less open
and welcoming style and tend to have less clear relationships with
other projects. I haven't followed roller enough to know if this
applies to roller in particular.
Again, I ask: what *specific problems* that we are now facing with
Roller can be solved by moving the build process to Maven?
Well, I haven't been willing to invest the hours necessary to really
understand roller's structure enough to identify intrinsic problems
but here are a few that I've encountered so far:
How do I answer these questions:
What external projects does roller depend on? How? Where do the
artifacts come from? What license are they under? Are there newer
versions of any of them?
What's the structure of the roller application? What are the
artifacts it produces and how are they related?
Where are the configuration files for a web app?
As I said before, not having quick enough answers for questions
including these has kept me personally from working on roller.
Obviously anyone who works on roller much will know the answers to
these questions or where the answers are. For me, they are a
significant barrier.
thanks
david jencks
- Dave
