I wanted to add my vote. When I started working with Roller, it was very easy for me to look into the code and understand the build process, ant is very widely used among java projects and I would think that most of people who are involved with java actually understand ant easily, is that case for maven? it wasn't that hard for me to learn ant, in fact I never read a book about ant to learn about it, my only hope is that maven is much the same.
I you can tell I have absolutely no experience with maven, but ask yourself why that is? is it because maven isn't that popular yet, so why isn't maven popular?. -1 for moving into Maven ----- Original Message ---- From: Allen Gilliland <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [email protected] Sent: Tuesday, February 12, 2008 1:21:38 PM Subject: Re: Maven2 build I would have to agree with Dave here, Maven vs. Ant has nothing to do with wanting to get people to be involved with the project. I've worked on Roller quite a bit and never felt that there was anything particularly difficult about the build process using purely ant, especially not something that would magically bring in new developers if we had Maven. Personally, I have never been a Maven fan and have never seen it make any significant improvement in a build environment that I have worked with. I would echo Phillip's opinion that Maven is "over-engineered" and has never really proved itself to me. -- Allen 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. > > Again, I ask: what *specific problems* that we are now facing with > Roller can be solved by moving the build process to Maven? > > - Dave
