I agree. No product comparison on the first page.
If one is written, it should be accurate and fair but, of course, it
will focus on things that the Maven community values and that reflect
the most common development practices as the community sees them.
It should be written in such a way that people who should use Ant will
understand why Maven is not the right choice and people who should use
Gradle will understand what they are gaining and what they are losing.
(Marmite haters should be allowed to go in peace with our blessing)
It should not be written in a way that starts a flame war or is
unhelpful to the developer who reads it.
Ron
On 10/01/2014 10:19 AM, Stephen Connolly wrote:
On 10 January 2014 15:02, Ron Wheeler <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
I am not sure that I agree with this section of
https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/MAVEN/Project+Description+Contest*
"Note: *this does not preclude us from including a "feature
comparison matrix" page somewhere in our site... but we should
recognise that such a matrix would likely be biased by our
philosophy, which most likely negates the utility of hosting such
a page on our site. Let us leave the feature comparison matrices
to those that have no axe to grind (and spend our energy ensuring
that their matrices are fair to us, just as other solutions in
this space should be doing for the representation of their tools
on such matrices)"
There may be some value is writing the comparison from a Maven
point of view.
It does give a chance to describe where there are differences and
why they are important from the POV of the "Maven way". Maven is
based on certain beliefs about the way software should be
developed and built. As most politicians can tell you, it is
better to define yourself than have someone else define you.
It is most uncertain that third parties will give the same
weighting to the value of certain practices and features that the
Maven community would.
It is clear from the discussions in this forum, that it is easy to
get off to a shaky start when first trying to use Maven. A person
doing a quick evaluation of development tools could easily bring
with them some assumptions about software development processes
and come up with a very distorted view of Maven.
I think that an accurate product comparison written from the maven
POV is fair and useful for someone coming to Maven for the first
time. It will highlight things that Maven does that other systems
don't do as well and there is no reason to exclude things where
Ant is better and explain why the Maven community does not
consider that a deal breaker.
Such a comparison should not be on the first page people land on. If
we can come up with a comparison that we think is fair to all, even if
comparing on our best feature set, then that is fine. The point I was
making in that "note" is that excluding mentioning the competition in
the project description does not mean we are excluding mentioning them
at all. The second point is that there is an argument against having
such a comparison chart anyway... but if we have one that we think is
fair to all and reflects our philosophy then that is fine... not
priority #1, #2 or #3 for a re-design of the maven site
Ron
--
Ron Wheeler
President
Artifact Software Inc
email: [email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>
skype: ronaldmwheeler
phone: 866-970-2435, ext 102
--
Ron Wheeler
President
Artifact Software Inc
email: [email protected]
skype: ronaldmwheeler
phone: 866-970-2435, ext 102
