On Mon, Aug 9, 2010 at 12:03 PM, Marshall Schor <[email protected]> wrote:
> Please post feedback on this build process - is this a good direction, and > whether or not you are able to do builds! > > I like some things about Maven, but the experience of using it has definitely been frustrating. Any time you try to do something out of the ordinary, it is a real struggle. I remember experiencing that frustration when we first migrated out build to Maven, and now I've been seeing Marshall go through it again. However, our previous build process wasn't so great either. Our ant scripts had grown organically until they were a mess that wasn't maintainable. And without maven to automatically download dependencies like Eclipse jars, in order to build UIMA you had to manually obtain Eclipse (and a particular version of it, too) and a couple of other dependencies, which was a pain. I think that I can work with what we have now, even if it's not ideal. I was able to do a build following the instructions, but it's very cumbersome and I worry that it will discourage people from becoming involved in the project. Some of this should resolve itself in time. Hopefully, it will not be too long before the Maven beta is released and m2eclipse comes packaged with it. I didn't know that editing the docbook plugin was optional, if I was willing to wait longer for a build. If that's the case, I'd be in favor of dropping this step entirely from the "one time setup" page - the shorter the instructions on that page, the better. The docbooks don't need to be built all that often anyway. -Adam
