One thing I would like to add to this discussion is that, in my experience, a lot of "Maven users" don't understand that Maven is not only about building but also about producing something that can be consumed from a repository. One part of what we often call "Maven" is the build tool, but a much more important part is having consumable artifacts in a repo. So, IMHO, I doesn't really matter if you can build something if it can't be consumed by other people. Doing "clever" solutions like producing multiple artifacts from one Maven project most often makes them hard (or even impossible) do consume from a repo in a correct way.
But yes, documentation about this could be much better. But as someone very correctly pointed out, there is very likely is a reason for the lack of this. It's all open source and contributions are gladly accepted. Even the Sonatype's book are open source (well, "Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, No Derivative Works 3.0 United States license"). If you have suggestions, additions, or whatever, file an enhancement ticket and it will be appreciated and most likely added. Some people do this, but there is always more that can be done and we can all participate. /Anders On Wed, Apr 18, 2012 at 02:00, Graham Leggett <[email protected]> wrote: > On 18 Apr 2012, at 1:44 AM, Eric Kolotyluk wrote: > >> Often the wrong foot is simply not knowing how much Maven does for your for >> free - because it is not obvious - especially when compared to tools like >> Ant. When the free stuff is not obvious, we naively start trying to solve >> problems we do not have to. > > The way I describe this is by getting people to ask the right question: > > Wrong question: "How do I do X?" > Right question: "Does does maven do X?" > > Maven already knows how to do stuff. Find out how maven does it, and let > maven get on with the job. As soon as you want maven to work your way, and > not maven's way, expect to have loads of your time wasted, and the time of > everyone after you too. > > The next thing is that maven isn't an alternative to ant, rather maven is an > alternative to ant's build.xml file. Or to put it another way, maven does > what build.xml does. build.xml gets written, rewritten and rewritten again > for every single ant project, but there is only one maven. I have to care how > your build.xml is different to my build.xml, I have to document how your > build.xml is different to my build.xml, but if we both used maven, all this > becomes unnecessary, because there is only one maven. > > Regards, > Graham > -- > --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
