Rafal Krzewski wrote:
Dalibor Topic wrote:
But this is not the proper forum to discuss package management systems. The thread is about using maven for package management, and I'm arguing that it's not suited for it.
Dude, you keep missing the point! Maven *is not* and does not *pose* itself to be a package management system!
Dude, you must have joined late in the thread ;) It's about a hypothetical, novel idea to use Maven not just as a build system, but also to distribute and manage software. It's not a general criticism of Maven.
It starts here http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.jakarta.turbine.maven.user/10502 and evolved into a discussion of how well Maven is suited for software distribution and management. The context is that novel idea, not Maven as it is.
I'm arguing it's not, that it's an inferior solution compared to native package management and in the case of software management and distribution it would be beneficial to employ native packages of artifacts where available. All within the context of that novel idea.
I see that we agree (though you may have misunderstood my intentions), and I pretty much agree with the rest of your post.
I'm not arguing that Maven is concerned with platform-dependencies, nor am I arguing that it should be. That's not very necessary in the context of Maven as a build tool.
But since the novel idea was about software distribution and management, not developement, I'm arguing with a lot of examples that platform-dependencies come into play when you deal with software distribution and management. I also questioned the implied notion of portability employed by some discutants, presenting real-world proof of 'pure java' not automatically implying being portable across platforms/runtimes/architectures.
It is a tool to build java libraries. And to document them. It is not concerned with the fact of the resulting library being specific to a single platform/architecture or general.
And from all that I can say from using it, it does the job as a build tool very nicely.
This may be considered unfortunate, but it's not Maven's mission to provide remedy for this situation. There is demand in Java community for statically assembled applications, and Maven meets this demand.
I fully agree. In that limited context, using Maven for software distribution and management makes sense, as all you have are big binary blobs. But in the context of general software distribution and management system, which was the novel idea, big binary blobs are not a great idea. ;)
I'd certainly love to see Maven running on as many platforms as possible, and being as much platform agnostic in the way it operates as it is possible.
I agree, and I'm as glad to help with testing, patches and bug reports as I'be been before.
cheers, dalibor topic
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