On Tue, Sep 07, 2010 at 03:44:37PM +0800, Glenn Adams wrote:
> That's reasonable. I wasn't asking you to personally commit it. I would
> commit it myself if I had the privileges, but am dependent on the good
> graces of other committers at present. Perhaps someone will volunteer.
 
> On Tue, Sep 7, 2010 at 3:42 PM, Jeremias Maerki 
> <[email protected]>wrote:
> 
> > Because I want to hear other opinions from the other committers first.
> > So far, none of the others responded. And I've stated in the past I
> > won't spend any more time on anything Maven-related, so I'm unlikely to
> > process the patch myself. I won't veto the addition but I certainly
> > won't spend any time maintaining it.
> >
> > On 07.09.2010 09:29:15 Glenn Adams wrote:
> > > ok; but is there any reason not to commit the patch to permit those who
> > find
> > > maven useful to use it? there are many features in FOP that cater to
> > > specific interests, why not permit that with the build process as well?

I would be happy to accommodate FOP developers who prefer Maven as a
build tool. However, as Jeremias pointed out, maintenance is a
problem.

At the moment we do have ant tasks that build a maven bundle, and a
wiki page telling us how to deploy the maven bundle. But that
committer is no longer around and has not responded to my requests for
assistance with the maven deployment. And his constructs no longer
work because the ASF has changed its repository structure and/or
instructions. Therefore we now have a problem.

Your patch is a good piece of work, for which thanks. But with it we
will be good as long as you are willing to maintain it, or as long as
the maven environment is not changing.  After that, its existence
makes a false promise, and none of the committers may be able to
remedy or even notice that.

As Jeremias already mentioned, for enterprise developers maintaining a
maven build framework may be of advantage, but for developers who are
on their own and are working on projects with a manageable set of
dependencies, the step to maven may not pay off. I realize you did it,
but that depends on a personal preference to go such roads or not.

When some developers use such a maven build and others FOP's ant
build, which guarantee do we have that both use the same dependency
versions?

Craig Ringer wrote:
> If you *do* want to create and push maven artifacts yourself but don't
> want to use Maven in builds, a Maven artifact can be created with the
> "cp" command and a text editor, or with an Ant task to spit out a
> suitable generated pom.xml . No biggie.

It is no biggie if you understand the maven world. If you do not know
it, there is a world of questions: What is a bundle, what is nexus,
what is sonatype, what is a central repository, how does staging work,
what are the elements of a pom file, what is maven about, what are all
those repositories, etc.

If a project is willing to contribute their jar files to a maven
repository, but otherwise does not want to take time to understand
maven, the above questions remain unanswered, and the task of
deployment is really a big problem.

Simon

-- 
Simon Pepping
home page: http://www.leverkruid.eu

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