The approach you are describing is akin to what the Eclipse provisioning platform (aka p2) provides with its concept of bundle pool (equivalent of GAC).
From experience, while this works in practice (for example a commercial distro of Eclipse called Yoxos ships like this (I'm not affiliated with them)), depending on the sort of applications you are delivering, it happens that consumers like being able to have access to an all-in-one download for ease of consumption and avoid uncertainties at install time. After all it is much easier for someone to validate the checksum of a zip rather than the proper behaviour of an installer. The other thing to consider in this space is the ever growing size of the cache. While in Maven this is quite easily handled by just deleting the .m2 folder, this approach would not work for such a cache, and then requires some GC to be put in place. All in all I think it is definitely a space to look into where the simplicity of expressing dependencies and metadata with maven coupled to the runtime characteristics of p2 (thread safe local repo, transactional install, GC) could really allow to put together a solution quite rapidly. On 2012-06-21, at 3:53 PM, Eric Kolotyluk wrote: > I have brought this notion up before, but I have been thinking about it a bit > more. > > Would it make sense to use Maven technology for software deployment and > installation as opposed to just builds? > > What I envision is something akin to the Global Assembly Cache in .NET, but > for Maven artifacts. In particular, the local repository would act like a > GAC, but you might want to separate a system local repository from the user > local repositories. > > The basic idea is that when deploying/installing software you would not > bundle all your dependent artifact into your installer, rather you would just > bundle their coordinates. At installation time you would install the Maven > Installer if it was not already there, then your installer would work in > conjunction with the Maven Installer. Basically the Maven Installer subsystem > would simply download the dependent artifacts from Maven Central or > elsewhere, and put them in the System Repository (similar to the GAC). > > One benefit of this is that if you have a lot of software that all reference > the same artifacts, they can share copies. Other benefits would be similar to > those for the .NET GAC, although hopefully we could avoid some of the > problems the GAC has created. > > Another benefit is that installers could be smaller by not bundling in > dependent artifacts. Installation could be faster in that if dependent > artifacts are already in the System Repository downloading and installing > them is unnecessary. > > So am I just thinking crazy, or is there any potential benefit to this idea? > > Cheers, Eric > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > 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]
