On Mon, 2011-10-24 at 07:25 +0100, Paolo Castagna wrote: > Ian Dickinson (Commented) (JIRA) wrote: > > Ian Dickinson commented on JENA-36: > > ----------------------------------- > > > >> We should probably remove the build.xml file. Any reason not to do so? > > Has there been a decision not to support builds other than using Maven? I > > use Maven quite happily, but I realise that not all of the rest of the > > world does! I would suggest that dropping non-Maven builds - a decision > > which may affect some current Jena users - should be at least ratified by a > > vote (unless there has already been one and I've forgotten it) > > Hi Ian, hi all, > I don't know if there are good reasons to have an Ant build.xml for Jena, > if there are, please, share them with me and the others.
We know there are Jena users who are not Maven users. I've had at least one discussion with a user in the last year along the lines "do we *really* move to using Maven or can we still build Jena without". However, I've no evidence how widespread that is and I agree there is a cost - Maven is not good at co-existing with other build systems. It would be reasonable to say that most users can simply use the zip or snapshot builds. So the few users who really want to build from source, along with all Jena developers, will have to be or become Maven users. My position on Maven is well known but I can't afford to time to support an alternative build system and sadly I think Maven-only is probably the best overall option for the project. If there was a vote on moving to Maven-only my vote would be "0". Dave
