I use Maven for 4 years now in a big enterprise project with ~200.000
loc, ~10-15 team members. Almost all of the developers would like to
switch back to Ant again, if we'd only had the time. I have used Maven
in other projects now and then, big or small. I usually don't use
strong terms such as "hate" when I describe projects or technologies,
but when I do my opinion is well-founded. I see the benefits of having
Maven for a small project such as Pivot, but I also see its
deficiencies, which are:
- cannot build the first time without having a broadband internet connection
- build suddenly breaks because someone put up a new artifact version
on the central repository (yes, this still happens, especially with
Maven's own dependencies. I am not talking about the teething troubles
back from Maven 1.0)
- build suddenly breaks because you are only using a new Maven minor
revision (2.0.9 instead of 2.0.8 for example) ==> forces every Pivot
user to use exactly the same Maven revision.
- consequence: as soon as the project gets bigger you better set up
your own private repository (admittedly not needed for Pivot)
- difficult to differentiate between transitive and non-transitive
runtime dependencies. Declaration for this seems to change every major
Maven release (1.x, 2.0, 2.2)
- surefire error reporting is poor if a test fails
- simple 'mvn clean' takes 1 minute on our 20 subprojects referenced
from the master pom, where otherwise it would just be 'rm -rf target/*'
- code coverage runs tests twice (or, if you want them to run only
once, the tests are no longer run in the 'test' phase)
- security issues: you'll have to trust all developers with write
access to ibiblio (thousands). It's easy to put up a poisioned
artifact, because checksums are kept in the same repository, in the
same location.
- have to explain every two weeks to a newbie how to set up Maven so
it works behind a corporate firewall
- Maven is a memory hog
- Maven downloads the internet
My apologies for using that emotional hate term without delivering a
proper explanation; it surely didn't help to avoid a flame war. But
your comments were no help either.
Regards,
Dirk.
Patrick Shea <[email protected]> wrote:
Oh boy... I had the same kind of reactions when I tried to introduce
ant 10 years ago...
I don't know of any serious project today not using maven.
Patrick
-----Original Message-----
From: "Christopher Brind" <[email protected]>
Sent: Tuesday, May 4, 2010 6:17pm
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Mavenization of pivot?
Maven is the marmite of the software world. :)
(I'm not a fan either, to be honest.)
On 4 May 2010 23:14, Dirk Moebius <[email protected]> wrote:
Thank god - I hate maven.
"Greg Brown" <[email protected]> wrote:
>No plans to switch to Maven.
>
>On May 4, 2010, at 3:43 PM, Patrick Shea wrote:
>
>> Is there any plan to get rid of ant and switch completely to maven? It
would be nice to be able to compile easily, produce javadocs and sources
jar's.
>>
>> Patrick
