Dan,
I get all that.. can you provide feedback on Gordon question: "Are you
saying it is not possible for maven to be used to build a release that
includes any jar file that is not published to a public maven repository? "
This is key as for most projects. everything that we use might not/will
not be in a maven repository. How is this best handled with maven?
As a side note - in Red Hat some of these types of issues are HELL for
us, and we have created a bunch of extra stuff to work around problems
in building distributions in a manageable way with 1000's of packages
when maven is involved.
Insights appreciated.
Carl.
Daniel Kulp wrote:
There seems to be a little bit of confusion around one of the major
benefits of using maven, namely the ability to more easily integrate into
other maven based projects, and I want to clear that up a bit.
With a traditional build system (like the current ant based build system),
the only final artifacts that we care about are the final distributions
that are shipped to end users. For this, we just provide a zip/tar.gz
that the user unpacks and uses based on the structure/scripts we provide.
That's perfectly fine for end users.
However, for other projects that would like to use it internally, it puts
a large burden on them. They need to unpack it, figure out the
dependencies, import it into their svn repository, update build systems,
etc... Whenever we release a new version, that whole process repeats
itself.
With maven, the set of artifacts that are released at release time expands
to also include the smaller artifacts that we build. For example: the
qpid-client jar. Those artifacts are published into the maven
repository. The associated pom.xml file describes the dependencies that
that artifact has. Thus, when another project declares a dependency
on "org.apache.qpid::qpid-client", maven will automatically also handle
the jms dependency, the mina dependency, the qpid-common dependency,
etc... However, that requires that all those dependencies also be
available. If they aren't, the whole process breaks down.
That's why Steve and I are strongly requesting to only depend on released
artifacts. (for testing, you can use locally installed artifacts like
fscontext. That would be <scope>test</scope>.) If you don't use
released artifacts, integration with projects like Tuscany and CXF will
be impossible.
Anyway, the main thing I wanted to point out that with maven, a release is
not just the end user distributions, but also the artifacts that other
projects will depend on.
