On Jun 12, 2008, at 4:34 AM, Chuck Hill wrote:
My question was more of this: I already keep my dependancies (as deployed) in svn. So I don't have any fear of them being unavailable in the future. Given that (and that I am comfortable with the implications of that as I understand them), what advantages does Maven offer me. I am willing to be convinced. I just don't "get" Maven yet. And I have had a few, er, run ins with it. What am I missing?
The whole thing about jars in SVN vs. in the repo is so typical of Maven - it is a nice idea in an ideal world, in reality it is a pain. Every time you start getting fancy with your deps, you POM's explodes with special rules excluding/fixing transitive dependencies, etc.
There are other genuinely good ideas. But IMO *all* of them are coupled with bad usability, just like the one above. Here is a few examples:
1. Project Descriptor. Build system done around a source tree model is great. Take Eclipse .classpath/.project for instance. In case of Maven this would be pom.xml. I like this approach. Model opens up your source tree to any number of build, analysis and reporting tools (even things outside of Maven plugin zoo, such as Ant Ivy can use the POMs). Now the XML format itself makes you want to cry. All tags and no attributes approach results in a sparse huge XML documents that are barely human-readable.
2. Build lifecycle. On the one hand you have a preset logical sequence of build events; on the other customizing it for something non-trivial can be a daunting task further exploding tour POM.
3. Eclipse Integration. Since there is a local repo under ~/.m2/ on your machine, you don't have to keep all your projects open in Eclipse for cross-reference purposes. Just the ones you are working on. This allows you to scale the development process. On the downside, all searches return each Java class twice - one from the dependent Eclipse project, and one from the repo. There is other Eclipse weirdness too, specific to plugin versions.
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