Chris, You make a good point. I tried to take the newby into account but obviously there is more that can be done. What I want to avoid is having every plugin become a maven tutorial because if anything changes, then a ton of places need to be updated. What if I add a link to the plugin documentation on the maven site? I think that would at least help a new user get the right info.
-----Original Message----- From: Christopher Cobb [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, January 04, 2006 8:55 AM To: 'Maven Users List' Subject: RE: [ANN] dependency-maven-plugin 1.0 > The Mojo team would like to announce the 1.0 release of the > dependency-maven-plugin: > > This plugin provides the capability to manipulate artifacts. It can > copy and/or unpack artifacts from repositories (local and remote)to a > specified location. Fantastic! This is exactly what I was looking for. > Detailed docs are available at: > http://mojo.codehaus.org/dependency-maven-plugin/ Thanks for setting up these docs. (The following is a little off-topic for dependency-maven-plugin specifically, but I think it needs to be said.) For an experience Maven2 user, the value of these docs is immediately obvious. For the newbie, however, there is still the feeling: "OK, so now what do I do." It would be great if there was just a tad more hand-holding within the plugin docs in general. And I think most of it could be boiler plate and auto-generated. Something along the lines of: To use this plugin you will need to add a project/build/plugins/plugin stanza to your pom. The basic stanza should look something like this: <project> ... <build> ... <plugins> ... <plugin> <artifactId>dependency-maven-plugin</artifactId> </plugin> ... </plugins> ... </build> ... </project> Etc... (You see, as a newbie, I'm not even sure if what I stated above is correct. Now I'm going to have to go do a bunch of googling to figure out exactly what IS the right way to use this plugin. And that is what I would like to avoid.) For every plugin, there will always be a newbie for whom this is the first plugin they have ever looked at. And they will need to be told what to do to use the plugin. And so every plugin should have complete information. This should be an automatic part of the plugin tools that are used when you create a plugin project. As a point of comparison, virtually every unix man page has a "usage" section and an "examples" section. The equivalent information is what is needed here. ----------------------------------------- Attention: Any views expressed in this message are those of the individual sender, except where the message states otherwise and the sender is authorized to state them to be the views of any such entity. The information contained in this message and or attachments is intended only for the person or entity to which it is addressed and may contain confidential and/or privileged material. If you received this in error, please contact the sender and delete the material from any system and destroy any copies. --------------------------------------------------------------------- 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]
