Michiel Meeuwissen wrote:
Pierre van Rooden wrote:
So, after Nico's presentation at the dev meeting, what do people think
of the use of Maven for MMBase?
As Ernst pointed out I feel that we indeed do have a formalized build
process already, and that it would be a bit folly to throw that out of
the window.
I tried to make this point at the presentation. We have a build system
which does what it should do. We don't have to switch to maven. Just
look at all the religious discussing on the web between ant an maven.
Maven is very useful when you start from scratch. MMbase is not starting
from scratch. The only question is if maven can do more for us then the
current ant build.
Still I feel that with maven we may be better suited for the future,
because sooner or later we are going to want something which we don't
currently support in our build already.
E.g. the maven reports are quite neat, and I would not like to imitate
that, and I rather would migrate to maven then.
At the committers meeting we discussed how we can improve our
communication channels and how we can make it easier for
mmbase-users/developers to use mmbase in their projects. The current ant
build system does not have good support for both.
Maven generates a project site which communicates what the status of
mmbase is. Maven gives project management (that's us) insight in the
progress of the project.
Maven has an implementation to handle internal and external
dependencies. MMbase is an external dependencies for users and should be
easy to use in their projects. We, committers, want more patches from
users and I believe a maven build system could offer that. The current
maven sources in speeltuin are a first setup and could be extended to
have a default build system for a user mmbase project. Users could then
add and remove the mmbase sources when they want in their development
process.
I would propose that we start using maven for simple things first,
e.g. the applications module and more importantly the 'contributions'
module, because that last one lacks a build completely, also because
this 'maven' decision keeps pending.
In that way everybody is forced to use it, it hardly can give very many
problems because it realy is quite straighforward there. We can easily
see what kind of problems it gives and/or solves.
If we are happy, we can gradually also replace the build of mmbase.jar
and of documentation etc.. If we are not happy, we simply throw it away
again, or - more realisticly - will live with two formalisms
simultaneously for ever...
We don't have to use maven yet. There is a mavenize goal in the
speeltuin which converts the current cvs structure to the desired maven
structure. The speeltuin sources are not there yet to replace the
current build, but I hope to have a new version in the near future.
Nico
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