> Ok, in your opinion what would be the advantage of making these things > above configurable? Do you really care that much if all classes are > output to target/ ?
It is sometimes useful to have classes be output outside the project directory. This is more useful with docs than code, but I used to build directly into JBoss's deploy folder when debugging. This was much faster than doing a full deploy every time something changed, so helped debugging immensely. Naturally, I'd never do that on a build machine, just a dev box. (As far as docs go, our CruiseControl build process updates all of our products and overrides the build target for the docs to the main web server directory on the machine. We do this rather than use all the web deploy stuff, which I find irritating, buggy and slow.) It also is extremely useful when forced to integrate your project with project that is not Mavenized. Not all projects have the luxury of full control over all of the code they use. At one point, for example, we were using Jetspeed which used Ant for builds (though it has since been Mavenized) and for various reasons it was easier to override our project's build target. Sure, we probably .could. have done it differently, but speed mattered to us more than beauty at that point. Next, one of Maven's strengths is its configurability. In spite of the fact that there are some strongly followed conventions in Maven (e.g. "one project, one artifact"), Maven manages (mostly) to avoid the stigma of being a One True Way cult that drives people away by virtue of the fact that you can deviate from the One True Way any time you like. When I first started using Maven, I read the description of the recommended project structure. If I hadn't seen a phrase to the effect of "of course, you can override any of these paths if you like", I probably would never have started using Maven at all, even though at the time I would not have been able to justify why I would want to change them. Being able to configure everything except the build directory would severely weaken Maven in probably functional ways and definitely reputational ways. Lastly, it is very unclear to me what forcing /target buys you. Worse, it is even less clear what forcing /target buys _me_. Wordman --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
