I have a plugin (org.kathrynhuxtable.maven.wagon.wagon-gitsite) that uploads your site documentation to github. It hasn't been verified to work with Maven 3 yet. The docs are at http://khuxtable.github.com/wagon-gitsite/, if you're interested.
-K On Oct 23, 2010, at 4:15 PM, Kenneth McDonald wrote: > First, note that I did tag this as repetitive: You don't need to be reading > it if you don't want to be rehashing recent issues. > > <beginning of rant> > However, I want to give a concrete example of just why I dislike maven (and > all other XML solutions) so far. I am trying to do what I think should be a > reasonably easy thing to do--upload onto github (or something similar) > current documentation for the project I have hosted on github. So far the > best solution I've seen involves making another branch of my project and > including the documentation there. This is fundamentally wrong (the docs are > _part_ of the project), but I'm not blaming maven here. It's probably a git > thing I don't yet understand. > > However, once we get past that, the pom files necessary to upload the docs > are daunting, to say the least. > > Even more than that, though, the pom files are fundamentally unreadable. Oh I > don't mean you can't puzzle through them in an afternoon or so if you have > the time. Of course you can. But (and I think this deserves to be in caps), > XML FILES ARE FUNDAMENTALLY WRITTEN WITH THE EASE OF THE COMPUTER, NOT THE > HUMAN, AT HAND. I mean, that's just a simple statement of fact, not an > opinion. I just don't get how people can be so oblivious to this. Would you > really want to program in a dialect of XML? How many people do you know who > do so? Do you really think that all of the work that has been done on parsers > and compilers over the last thirty years has been in vain because, > realistically, humans should just program in XML? I open up an XML file, and > unless I'm quite familiar with the "dialect" of XML in use, simply > understanding the structure takes at least half an hour. THEN I need to > understand the content. There is too much redundancy, too few structural cues > to indicate meaning, too few keywords (yes, they're important!), too much > nesting, too little ordering in that nesting...I could go on. > > Of course people will dispute this. They're wrong. If they were right, we > would have had something like XML for all our programming needs twenty years > ago. Sorry people, you're just plain wrong. > > Now, what are the claims made for (or implied by) maven: > 1) That it is declaratively, not procedurally, based. > 1-a) Whoop-te-do. So are makefiles. Sure, they've accumulated a lot of crud > over the years (and a rewrite _like_ maven was probably necessary to clear > this out), but makefiles are, at their core pretty simple. You have a build > target. It depends on other build targets. You build those other targets, and > then you build what you're working on. Is this revolutionary? > 1-b) I've mentioned this before, but Prolog has been doing declarative > programming for years. Without obscure semantics. With lots of extra > expressive power, like list manipulations, arithmetic, etc. etc. With an > understandable syntax. With lots of extra libraries. Would it have really > been so bad to base a declarative codebase on Prolog, a mature, proven > technology? > 2) XML is standards based. > 2-a) Sure. Like Prolog. Or even (choose a variant of) LISP, for god's sake. > All of these "languages" are standards compliant until they're not. XML will > suffer the same fate. > 3) XML makes it easy to interoperate with other systems. > 3-b) This is the biggest piece of bullshit I've ever heard. It totally > confuses a data format (let's say, "ASCII") with a data standard (let's say, > "CORBA", though that's stretching things.) XML is a data format, pure and > simple. No matter how hard it tries (remember DTDs?), it cannot attain the > status of a data standard, because the needs of data standards evolve and > continually require new things. So a data format such as ASCII, can have > quite a long life--but trying to do the same thing to a data standard is a > pointless exercise, and will not hold. > 4) Apache is wedded to XML. > 4-a) This one really pisses me off because I suspect it's absolutely true. I > believe that Apache has a large number of very talented programmers, and I > believe they are, in large respect, wasting their time because they have come > to worship XML. I don't get it. There are things for which XML is > appropriate. There are also so many things for which it's not, that why would > you spend all of your time there? I don't have an answer. > > Anyway > </end of rant> > Ken > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] > For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected] >
