I'd like to let the general NMaven community know that we are dissolving NMaven from the Apache Incubator and will be moving the project to Sonatype Forge (http://sonatype.org) over the next week. I can't speak for all members of the NMaven PPMC but my personal reasons are that after 2 years in the incubator, we have failed to gain traction with the community. The community involvement was quite active while NMaven was at sourceforge, drying up very quickly after moving to ASF.
Looking back, I think there were a number of reasons for this. First, I don't think the Apache brand name has as much appeal to the .NET crowd, so it was easy for us to get buried. Second, we tied NMaven to a Maven 2.1 snapshot to support Visual Studio, and thus were stuck at a point where we couldn't do a release. Finally, I took a divergent path from Maven implementation, in part to solve problems with lack of toolchain support and versionless artifact file names, and this made it difficult for Maven developers to understand and to make contributions. The 0.15 release earlier in the year was designed to address these problems. Yet we still didn't gain much traction with the user or developer community, pointing to something more fundamental. Given these problems, I'd like to take NMaven to Sonatype Forge, giving it a fresh start, getting back visibility, community involvement and a steady release schedule. Now in regards to the future plans. A number of .NET developers I talked to said that they while they liked Maven and the concept of the Project Model, they didn't want to have to install Java and Maven on their systems to use it. And finding developers who know Maven, Java and .NET is not the easiest thing, so I'll be putting in some time into Byldan (http://codeplex.com/byldan), a .NET version of Maven. I'm looking to port over the new 3.0 project builder code, so we can start bringing the Byldan project model inline with Maven's pom. We can build the plugins once in .NET and then execute them using either Byldan or NMaven. The unreleased version 0.14 has this .NET plugin support, but that code needs to be rewritten and/or cleaned up. We will need developers with experience in app loading and app domains. Another area I would like to focus on is the Visual Studio support. Eugene has done a lot of work with the m2eclipse plugin, using Lucene indexing of the the POMs for artifact searches, so I'm looking to create similar functionality using Lucene.NET. The final areas of focus are ones that we have been trying to solve from day one: properly handling versionless artifact file names and doing toolchain support, at both the client and server level. These problems are enormously difficult to do against the web based repositories, so I will be looking to integrate NMaven/Byldan with the Nexus Repo Manager Rest APIs, just pegging the technology so we can get things moving more quickly. This should also make things like PDB attached artifacts easier to handle. I'll be posting more transition information over the coming week. Feel free to shoot back with any questions or concerns. Thanks, Shane
