Yesterday Dick Wall send these messages on Twitter: "is codehaus.org down for anyone else? Takes on a whole new meaning of fail when you have it in your maven repos. Come on guys..."
Carl Quinn replied later that day: "@dickwall A weakness of Maven: You need a caching local repository like Artifactory? :)" I just want to comment on that. I really do not agree that this is a weakness of Maven. Of course it is a shame when the codehaus servers are down. But lets try to step back and think about how package management were done before Maven. Back then it was a common approach to check the dependencies into the code repository together with the code itself. That was a nightmare to maintain because you needed to find out about (and include) the transitive dependencies. And you also needed to find out yourself if any of the transitive dependencies could be up- or downgraded without causing problems When Maven came along we suddenly got a very simple and powerful way of keeping packages organized. And people loved that packages were downloaded automatically when added into the project pom. But sadly this have made us lazy and blind. Package management is HARD and should never be ignored. Even when we have Maven and the Codehaus repositories. As Carl points out you should always have a local maven repository within you organization. The reasons are: 1) You really do not want all your developers to get into trouble when Codehaus (or other mirrors) are down 2) You want a place where you can create maven packages of projects that are not in the Codehaus repository 3) You want to be able to block out certain packages. eg: Lets say that commons-logging are something that should not be used within your organisation. 4) You do not wanna waste your developers time. A local repository is much faster than external servers (at least should be) I'm sure there are other good reasons as well. But as I said before; This is not a Maven weakness! Keeping a local repository is something you will always need. Maven or not. With Nexus and Artifactory this has never been easier. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
