Yeah, I feel your pain. I assumed that part of us discussing moving
to it and voting for it, also implied that people would have to get up
to speed on it and at least learn the basics of how Maven works. I'm
happy to help people get over the curve, but no one has asked until
very recently. I am trying to get cycles to work on it more to
finish it off, but I could use an extra set of eyes to look at what
gets built. I am definitely open to suggestions. We could go back
to Ant, but I'm afraid that is just going to delay things even more.
The fact is the release mechanism is pretty nice in Maven and
completely roll your own in Ant. The only sticking point right now, I
believe, is actually pinning down what is in the big tarball.
As for the Grouplens example, the Ant process seemed really convoluted
to me to begin with, so that is why it wasn't obvious how to port it,
which is why I opened the JIRA issue to simplify/automate it. I think
we could set it up, however, so that when in examples, you could do
mvn package and you could get a Grouplens WAR.
I'm all for a simpler approach to doing it and I think Maven will be
simpler in the long run, but realize it may be painful for now. I
always feel like, with Maven, that it gets me about 90% of what I
want, but the last 10% is a pain. The assembly and modules is in that
10% for me.
What I would suggest is that you open up JIRA issues (or mail the
list) for the specific things that are broken, and then we can
methodically work through them.
For the most part, I think you should be able to do most things with:
mvn compile
mvn test
mvn install
mvn package
Also see http://cwiki.apache.org/MAHOUT/buildingmahout.html - And
please feel free to edit.
On Mar 13, 2009, at 2:03 PM, Sean Owen wrote:
I am struggling to get the 'taste-web' module working with Maven. The
build product needs to include the 'examples' classes in order to get
at the default example Recommender, but my attempts to add it as a
dependency failed in ways I don't get.
If I were being pessimistic, I'd say that the move to Maven has seemed
to bring nothing but problems so far. We had a working build -- I had
a working build. Now we don't. I had an easy example for people to
deploy and now I don't. What it builds now is also suboptimal,
including a ton of code that's not needed. I've removed or shuffled
code to accommodate Maven (e.g. I used to generate optimized bytecode
but that was pulled because it was too hard in Maven). I can't
effectively run the tests or manage my build like I could. It's not
just temporary either -- this has been un-working for months, and
delayed a release of updated code that I do want to get out to users.
You could say it's just because we are new to Maven -- I sure am --
but, if we have to be more expert to get value from Maven and aren't,
it might as well not provide that value.
I understand and believe there is some theoretical benefit to Maven --
are we seeing any upside? I would still go along with it if these
immediate problems can be patched up, but wanted to raise the honest
question of whether this has been a benefit or not.
In particular I'd like to move back to Ant in my little patch of
ground, taste-web, unless these issues can be resolved. I could get
back to a working state and reinstate some benefits from the old
working build, while not interrupting others who it seems are yet keen
to use Maven in the project at large, and that is fine by me. If I
have somewhere I can dump out working products for users, 90% of my
concerns go away.
