On Mon, 2005-04-25 at 16:41 +0200, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > http://maven.apache.org/maven2/ant-tasks.html > > Just a word to say developping this is a brave initiative because these > maven features are probably ones of those that made people quit ant to use > maven, but as it will help people that don't use maven but just ant to > work, it's just fair-play. > > So IMHO it's just a great idea.
Here what we are trying to do is let people reuse the tools we created for artifact handling so people don't keep rewriting this stuff. Many Ant projects have cropped up doing simple dependency management and we believe that we're approaching the problem correctly in Maven and want to share that. We couldn't do this easily with Maven 1.x but that has changed with component oriented focus in Maven 2.x and so we can share a lot more. We also want to promote the use the POM as a general catalog of project information. If you've seen the synchronization report go by on the dev list you'll see we're processing ~8600 artifacts right now which means we've got 8600 POMs to share. That's a lot of project information and with the tools we're creating that information will only become more accurate and be a richer source of project information. We would like to see projects use this information so we are trying to facilitate its by providing good tools. One such set of tools are the Ant tasks. A lot of people, for whatever reason, don't want to use Maven or can't use Maven. For people who need to use Ant we have provided this set of tools in an attempt to make dependency management easier. This is will help facilitate a transition to Maven because the dependency management, and more importantly the general artifact handling will be the same across the transition. In a further refinement of our Ant tasks we will probably allow the use of management dependency directly from a POM. So you can see where we are going. We will have artifact handling that people can use by having a POM and we will release tools like our site generation mechanism as a set of Ant tasks. We can do this because it's not difficult for us any more and will allow a more gradual adoption of Maven features without having to jump into Maven whole hog which for many is not possible. Eventually we are hoping that people just say "Why don't I just use Maven, I'm using all their tools anyway ...". But we'll see. We at the very least want to make the tools available to non-Maven users. > BTW as organizing the dependencies is something not-so-friendly to do, it > will be easier to people that have done it under ant to migrate to maven. We'll give folks that choice. We think there is far greater value in Maven than merely dependency management but this is one of the features in Maven that garners the most attention because it is tedious. We're hoping that people see the value in a uniform build infrastructure by way of applying the same rules to all your project in order to get lots more done. We can only hope but in the meantime we'll release more of our features as tools that can be used outside the realm of Maven. -- jvz. Jason van Zyl jason at maven.org http://maven.apache.org We know what we are, but know not what we may be. -- Shakespeare --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
