I agree completely with many of your points. But this is the [EMAIL PROTECTED] list, and unfortunately, a very small percentage of the people on this list have an ability to actually do much about the situation with the documentation. Other than of course write something and put it up in our blog, post it on the email list as a HOWTO, perhaps submit it as an Enhancement in JIRA and hope the Maven dev group accepts it and posts it in the documentation etc.
I'm not sure how an open-source users group can most effectively influence the development efforts of a project. I know this is a common problem in open source, so I wonder how other groups handle it. As a developer by day (and I'm sure you're one too, or else you would have given up on Maven on day 2), I'm sure you struggle with development vs documentation. You want to add features (especially if you need them yourself), fix bugs, etc and at least for me, writing docs and helping people use my software is pretty low on my list. So it can be expected to a certain degree. Another problem is the speed of change in Maven and its plugins, since it is still such a new project. Today's maven-XXX-plugin v2.0-SNAPSHOT might not support featureXYZ, but by next week, that feature has been added and you can enable it by adding <xyz>blah</xyz> to your build section of pom.xml. So you need to keep documentation up to date through all the changes, which is tough. I'm all ears if anyone on this list has recommendations for how to "solve" this problem, at least for the Maven project... Wayne On 3/6/06, Brad O'Hearne <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Wayne, > > Thank you for your response, and be assured, I am grateful. But I > suppose I also wonder, if this is such a common question, why isn't it > in the documentation or the FAQ? I routinely see questions asked on > this list that receive RTFM-type answers (I'm not referring necessarily > to yours, but in general), when it begs the obvious question as to why > all these "common" issues aren't in plain black and white in the > documentation? I don't think that there's any valor in an answer that > basically says, "the answer is elsewhere, go find it". > > Please excuse my comments here -- they are not directed at you, but the > situation in general. I've been working with maven for about a month > now, and it truly is a great piece of technology. But there are more > holes in the documentation and issues not covered that can be counted, > and for each one of those little issues the answer has been "Google it". > Add up about 50 of those, and you can sink quite a bit of time sifting > through the gazillion results that come up on Google. I'll be quite > frank -- I think maven is terrific, but the amount of time I have sunk > into untangling all of the issues getting projects configured, packaged, > and deployed, remote repositories configured, maven-proxy configured, > and the Eclipse plugins / projects configured, has me wondering how > close I'd be to a clean solution written myself. This isn't to say I > would do better, but when you have to search and tinker repeatedly on > common usage issues, your time is no longer user time, it becomes > developer-time > > I guess I just sometimes wonder what the positive effect would be if the > maven developers took half the development effort and didn't cut any > more lines of code, and just documented things. > > Thanks for suffering my comments.... > > Brad > > > > Wayne Fay wrote: > > >This is a very COMMON question. Please search Google and the Maven > >Users list archive for various responses to this question. > > > >Wayne > > > > > >On 3/6/06, Brad O'Hearne <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > > >>I am building a jar (and ejb module) that needs to have all of its > >>dependencies included within the packaged jar archive. How can I > >>accomplish this? > >> > >>Cheers, > >> > >>Brad > >> > >>--------------------------------------------------------------------- > >>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] > > > > > > > > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > 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]
