It is pretty common for people to view Maven as the ultimate tar baby. The view is, if the developers use it, everyone else in sight gets forced to use it.
This does not turn out to be the case. On the one hand, a completely ant (or otherwise) project can choose to publish its results to the maven infrastructure for the convenience of those users who use Maven, with no change to producing plain old releases for people who are happy with them. On the other hand, a project can be built using Maven, and still cough up a plain vanilla installation package that imposes no Maven usage on anyone who just wants to use the binaries. This is, in fact, a defacto requirement across the ASF. All the projects that use Maven as a build tool (except for those producing pieces of Maven itself) use it to produce full release packages in addition to publishing Maven artifacts. I'm only writing this, by the way, because I think it benefits people to understand the issues here. I'm not trying to sell anyone anything. If there is a bugzilla out there, however, begging for maven publication of fop, I would be happy to submit a patch that added the necessary bits to the existing ant build.xml to publish releases to the ASF maven repo -- without changing anything else about how fop is built and released. The question of whether Maven forces a giant Enterprise infrastructure is a somewhat complex one that doesn't need to be elaborated here.
