Ant isn't perfect, but it's flexible, common, simple, and reliable.
Maven is, by many accounts, a huge pain in the keister.
Webtop used Ivy for dependency management for a while. Maintaining the
local repository was a hassle. It slowed down the build process.
Everyone but me hated it. Eventually we ripped it out and went back to
checking in the jars. My new stance is that in many cases dependency
management is a problem where the cure is just as bad as the disease.
David
On Jan 21, 2010, at 12:22 AM, Rami Ojares / AMG Oy <[email protected]
> wrote:
Maven would be much better, but the compiler uses some JARs which
are probably not available in public repositories.
Maven's "coolest" feature is it's weakest link.
In my experience the dependencies of a project almost always end up
being unorthodox.
Say there is one nasty bug in some lib which you fix in your own copy
but maybe the project is not accepting your update (the project
might be
dead and there is nobody updating). Or it might take a year for the
update to be published or most likely you don't have the time to share
your update upstream.
That's why it's best to stick with your own local copies of
dependencies.
But what I think might be a good thing is dependency management in
general.
And there is a separate project for that in apache called ivy.
Also I quess maven can be used without resorting to public dependency
repositories.
I am not sure because I have my own personal build system (for better
AND worse).
- rami
On Jan 21, 2010, at 4:15 AM, Max Carlson wrote:
+1 from me. Anything we can do to use more modern libraries is a
win. It would be even better if we could switch to Maven and take
advantage of the sweet automatic JAR dependency management - but
that's a much larger job.
Regards,
Max Carlson
OpenLaszlo.org
