> >
> > This thread has highlighted the fact that the documentation doesn't
> > help new users of maven, or users of maven who have no desire to
> > become experts. Just dumping yet more documentation on this
> group of
> > people isn't going to answer their questions.
>
> There are some questions that come up repeatedly on this ml.
> If you've subscribed for more than a few weeks and read most
> emails, you've already seen what I'm talking about. My
> personal pet peeve is the compiler target/source issue.
>
> In many of these common cases, the issue has been documented.
> Usually in the FAQ and in the Wiki and in the plugin docs
> too. Also it is documented well in Google and in the ml
> archive. And yet people still ask this question every 5-10
> days and sometimes more often.
>
> How can you help people who ask this question (and others
> like it)? I agree that _more_ documentation is not
> necessarily the magic bullet that many believe it is.
The argument that "some people don't read documentation so there is no
point in writing any more" is a non-sequitor. Please don't fall into
that trap.
My *personal* opinion about why *I* find maven so hard is the complete
mental disconnect between the lifecycle phase (task) and the
configuration, coupled with the voodoo of 'convention'. In ant, tasks
seem to me to be the top-level view. In maven, goals and executions are
embedded waaaay down the configuration and are necessary/unnecessary
depending on what bindings were configured by annotations in the code
that the developer thought were sensible (If I understand the
documentation that I've read correctly :o} ). In maven, I tend to reach
where I want to get in a similar fashion to a friend who got given a C++
project some time ago. He said to me that he finally got it all to
compile and run by "throwing various combinations of asterisks at it at
random until I got something that worked". My pom file editing often
feels like that.
Later,
Andy
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