I'm very familiar with Ant (both using and developing Ant tasks), and much
less familiar with Maven (nearly zero). I think this is also the case,
maybe not as extremely, out in our "developer/user" community. So there's a
learning cost, not just for us but for those who download, build, tweak,
extend (...) Roller.
I'm intrigued by the component-oriented build approach in Maven, but Roller
still seems to me to be at a fairly manageable level of complexity using Ant
today. Our build could be cleaned up a bit (in the peripheral targets
mostly), but I think we're going to face architectural pattern questions
sooner than build pattern issues as we grow.
--a.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Rudman Max" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <roller-dev@incubator.apache.org>
Sent: Tuesday, September 13, 2005 10:53 PM
Subject: Re: Maven
Ok, I guess that's a "no" :) I am not sure what sort of problems you
experienced but Maven is bit fickle -- especially in the first version.
It took me some time (and a little frustration) to get used to it. But,
now I swear by it. Anyway, this is really not that important to me so
it's not even worth a whole lot of discussion.
Max
On Sep 13, 2005, at 10:39 PM, Allen Gilliland wrote:
Actually, I am pretty much against maven right now. I don't have that
much experience with it, but my feeling is that it introduces complexity
with no real benefit. I prefer to know that by checking out the
repository (via cvs, svn, whatever) I've got *all* the tools I need to
build the application.
I took over a project a couple months ago that used maven and the whole
thing was totally f**ked up. I never even got it to build properly
before giving up and rewriting the whole build process from scratch
using just ant. Maybe the original author didn't set it up right, but
that definitely turned me off to maven.
-- Allen
Matt Raible wrote:
I don't see a problem with it - but if it ain't broke - why fix it? ;-)
Matt
On 9/13/05, Rudman Max <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
How do people feel about "Mavenizing" Roller? For those who are not
familiar with it, Maven is "a software project management and
comprehension tool". It's is somewhat similar to Ant, in fact it uses
Ant goals under the hood (though upcoming Maven2 does not), but it
also keeps metadata about the project which allows it to be much more
intelligent.
The difference between Ant and Maven is like that between a
procedural and a declarative language. Instead of telling Ant what
to do in order to build, you tell Maven what you want done and it
figures out what needs to be done based on the XML configuration
file. Maven automatically tracks and downloads dependencies for you,
versions the artifact, produces documentation website with JavaDocs
and unit-test coverage reports.
I've "mavenized" Roller 1.x branch and would be happy to contribute
that to the project. Let me know if there is any interest in that.
You can learn more about Maven at http://maven.apache.org
Max
