I'm curious.. Many other successful open source projects exists without
maven? I know some do use maven but I can't establish the reasoning
behind it. AFAIK maven allows you to download jars associated with
project. Other than disk space and initial download time I don't see
what that buys you. It's just another piece that has to work which I
would prefer not to have to deal with. Why create an unnecessary barrier
to adoption? Am I missing something here about the benefits of maven and
what the advantages of using maven would be to this or any project for
that matter?

Garry

-----Original Message-----
From: Mikko Wuokko [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Tuesday, February 21, 2006 12:35 PM
To: Jetspeed Users List
Subject: Re: RFC: J2 Build System

I don't see how people can really say anything about how bad maven is if
they haven't tried it for starters. I cannot say that I'm an expert on
either Maven or Ant, but fas as I have understood that the real strength
in Maven is the reduced initial download size as you don't need to
download all the dependencies as well and not all of them at all
depending on what you're doing. The dependencies stay more up-to-date
also. And of course the build management :)

I did have my troubles getting started with Maven, but it wasn't that
hard after all. And you should understand that when starting to use a
new project manager (or how do you call them), whether it is Ant or
Maven or something else, that it takes its own time to get in. Not
everyone are experienced and familiar with Ant (like myself), so it was
quite the same for me which it was.

The Maven 1 configurations are confusing, yes, but a lot, I think, has
been improved in Maven 2. Building the Jetspeed (the current trunk) is
simple as this

mvn -P tomcat

well, yes, you have to copy and modify the settings.xml file but it is
much more simpler than the Maven 1 build.properties. Here is the thing
where more detailed documentation should be, that what these all
configuration parameters are? If you just want to see how Jetspeed looks
like, there are the installers, but if you want to get your hand on it,
you must be prepared to get them a little bit dirty.

I don't have exact idea how hard is to make all the dependencies and
build configurations for Maven 2 than on Maven 1 or Ant, but as there
was a post which said they are more demanding, if it makes the portal
developing and building easier, isn't that a good thing? I think it
would scare more people away (expecially the freshmen) if the
development is made easier on the price of a more complicated building.

Also the other portals projects (bridges, wsrp4j) are apparently
transferring to M2 and consistency is always a good thing.

Personally I would bet for the Maven 2, but I'm not a committer
struggling with the inheritance and transitive dependencies (maybe
somday).

I trust you make a good decision.

-Mikko

Randy Watler wrote:
> J2 Users:
>
> The J2 development team has an open vote underway on the future
> direction of the J2 build system. For many practical reasons, it is
> time that we as a community make a decision on what, if anything, we
> are going to base the future releases of J2 on. In a nutshell, there
> are three options:
>
> 1 - Stay with a capped Maven 1.X based system and its plugin as
> currently architected.
> 2 - Upgrade to Maven 2.0+, porting the existing plugin genapp features

> to a Maven 2 archetype.
> 3 - Stick with a plain Ant based build with dependencies jars checked
> into the project source control system, (svn).
>
> As you might appreciate, this topic has many complex trade offs
> associated with it. As part of the J2 community, we would like you all

> to have a voice in this decision... after all, J2 users will have to
> live with this decision just as we do ourselves.
>
> For those that would like to read up on this thread, here is one mail
> archive link:
>
> http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/portals-jetspeed-dev/200602.m
> box/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
> Please feel free to comment on this thread or the dev list thread.
>
> Thanks in advance for your feedback,
>
> Randy
>
>
>
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