My $0.02: First of all, lets note that I make most of my livelihood working on maven builds, so this is not (repeat NOT) criticism of the product, developers, or community at large.
The maven users list (and the associted developers lists and users lists for all the OTHER not-necessarily-maven-specific-but-used-by-practically-nobody-else stuff, like wagon) are currently the only way data gets shared. Like it or not, people read a lot of wikis, but rarely write to them. They WILL, however, provide their comments from the peanut gallery on a mailing list. I'm currently looking at 1212 unread messages in my inbox from this list. That's from the last few weeks when I've been swamped with work and haven't had time to even go through the list to cull possible useful information. Nobody, least of all me, expects people who write software for free to ALSO do everything ELSE associated with the software. Unfortunately, in the case of of the maven suite (maven/plexus/wagon/cargo/doxia/archiva/etc), it's practically impossible for anyone else to do anything. The core team, whose membership I'm a little fuzzy on at the moment, has a lot of the "how to do thing X" locked up in one of several places: 1. The existent site docs. The guides are good, but pretty weak in a number of places 2. The Mergere book. This thing is the only, and I do mean only, reason that I was able to develop anything more than the simplest of plugins. 3. This list, which I hold in Gmail and use searches on every time I have a problem. But frankly, this list is often like a group at a coffee shop. There's a lot of "I need" requests (like this thread is) and a lot of "Me, too" responses, and far fewer "HOWTO" responses. and mostly 4. Inside people's heads. This is where a lot of useful stuff lives, not just in OSS but in everyday life. And writing what you know (or more probably what you THINK you know) down for everyone to cut to shreds evokes human fears by the droves. Ergo, people usually don't do it. Fact: Signal to noise on the maven lists is pretty low. Fact: The reason this ratio is low is because much of the signal comes in the form of HOWTOs for extremely simple problems Fact: N00bs need docs. Ignoring the asshats that dive into something as complex as maven and want to be hand-held through the process, most newbies can glean essential information by reading. Opinion: Docs need improving. If a lot of the basic documentation for maven were somewhat improved as an overall effort BY ALL OF US, the signal would go up because the list would be where we discussed and vetted real problems instead of "How do I get started" questions. Note that I'm firmly in the "Docs need to be better" crowd now. Since my religion demands that I take responsibility for my life, I guess that means that once I post this, I've got to go to the Maven user wiki and start doing updates. Anyone else that feels like it is welcome to join me there. -- I'm just an unfrozen caveman software developer. I don't understand your strange, "modern" ways.
