On Thu, Oct 14, 2010 at 9:34 AM, Graham Leggett <[email protected]> wrote: [del] > As soon as you need to start documenting things, you're starting to go > wrong. Practically, you may have to document some things, such as where to > get certificates for access, but you should strive to keep this > documentation to zero or as near zero as humanly possible. > > Documentation costs money to write, it costs money to read, it costs money > when someone missed the vital bit of the documentation and things go wrong. > This is where the "configuration by convention" really shines. If you know > the convention, you don't need to waste time with documentation, > troubleshooting, customisation, you just get on with it.
While in principle I agree, it assumes that the developer has bootstrapped knowledge about how maven does stuff. This is where people need to read the books on maven development. So once they have read (and understood) the books at http://maven.apache.org/articles.html then your statements become true. This is because my experience has been that a developer using Ant has to learn Ant in order to get the build working, they become a semi-expert or at least an advanced Ant user. But those that use Maven can stay at a very basic level of Maven understanding, "mvn install" and you are done. The down side is that because they get stuck at a basic level it becomes more difficult to become an advanced user. Not becuase becoming an advanced user is hard, but they are not forced to become one. So it does mean that they lean on the local maven expert for knowledge and when things go wrong have more trouble working out why and how to fix it. Having been the Ant expert and attempting to build the "one ant build file for any project", I was finding this more and more difficult and complex to achieve and maintain. I found Maven 2 a few years back and I've never regretted the decision, and as a last resort (because I'm too lazy to write a plugin or the solution is too once off) I can always write an Ant snippet to do some work that maven will run for me but not like the original poster who started this thread off. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
