Thus what you are waiting for are : - Maven polyglot which will allow to write the pom in various formats (simplified xml, groovy, whatever) : http://polyglot.sonatype.org/ - Mixins which will allow to inject part of poms and thus ease how we can reuse them : http://www.sonatype.com/people/2008/11/maven-project-model/
It's cool, it's on its way ... On Oct 25, 2010, at 2:26 PM, Benson Margulies wrote: > I've tried to come up with a 'moderate' reprocessing of this dispute > before, and for some reason I'm going to try again. > > The fundamental idea of Maven is that a build can be described with a > small number of facts. This is possible if the right conventions are > analyzed, designed, and implemented into the build system. > > If a build can be described as a small number of facts, XML is an > unobjectional representation for those facts. If a POM fits on a page, > verbosity of XML is just not an issue. > > Further, historically, Maven came behind Ant. If there's one thing > worse that a few facts in XML, it's many, many, facts, and a small > procedural language, in XML. > > For many purposes, and on many occasions, Maven succeeds in the > 'fundamental idea' above. > > There is, however, a however. In some cases, POMs grow hair. Posters > to this list sometimes seem to believe that every bit of that hair is > illegitimate -- that it either reflects ignorance of 'the maven way,' > or it reflects insufficient willingness to create new maven plugins. > > I think that this is an oversimplification. Start setting up a > release, or the maven-eclipse-plugin, or a non-trivial web > application, and you will find that your POM gets bigger and bigger > and harder and harder to manage and understand. Cases that I'm > familiar with include trying to cope with the interactions of > <reporting/> plugins and ordinary plugins. In my opinion, XML does add > a bit of salt to these wounds. > > However, over-focussing on the supposed intrinsic evil of XML, either > on the complaint or the defense side, is a distraction. In my opinion, > the real question is, "What would it take to keep 'maven way' POMs > from growing and ramifying out of maintainability?" > > Generalize the 'main versus site' lifecycle to allow multiple > lifecycle definitions, defined once, and reused in many poms? > > Some way to package up a gang of plugin specs for reuse? > > Support for 'include'? > > Tighter XML for common cases? My favorite in this area is goals. Oh > how I wish for: > > <execution id='id' phase='phase' goal='goal'> > ... > </execution> > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] > For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected] > --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
