On Mon, Sep 29, 2003 at 12:50:57PM +0200, Stefano Mazzocchi wrote: ...
At the same time, the Maven vs. Centipede debate is a human one, technology is something that can easily be changed, personal feelings aren't. There is friction between the people behind Maven and the people behind Centipede.
I think it goes deeper than people friction. Maven tries to "embrace and extend" Ant/Gump/Velocity/JJAR/Avalon/The World, whereas Centipede tried to work with them.
I know none of the people involved in either, have no opinion technically or philosophically about either, and consider myself completely neutral in this aspect of the debate. In short, I am Switzerland. So,
So personally (everyone gets 2c to spend, right?), I don't think Cocoon should bet on Maven (philosophical reasons) or Centipede (technical reasons). Stick with Ant. Ant 1.6 has this <import> feature (similar to XSLT import), that is going to make complex build systems like Cocoon's *much* easier to manage. Best feature since Ant was invented.
...
I believe this is the best way to go for the following reasons:
- We have so much new stuff to do the cost/benefit really has to be extraordinary to justify the move.
- I think the perceived need diminishes _significantly_ with real blocks.
a) The blocks build will not be a part of the cocoon build.
b) Retrieving blocks will not be a part of the build, but of the deploy process.
- I think we need to keep the familiarity of ant available for the _blocks_ build process, as that's the one most users may get involved in. How does Maven or Centipede's market share compare to Ant? (of course no one has numbers on this, but would anyone argue that it's even close?)
- The core cocoon build system will be less important after blocks as we can resume binary distributions. If at that point we still see a need, fine.
This really is my VHO.
We care about Forrest, we care about Gump. If Maven does good things but lacks a few, we should use it *exactly* for that: so that we can improve it, build synergies, instead of wasting energies in progressing a competition.
And I'll play ball if we decide to go that way too. However, I see the same argument in favor of ant. Why waste energies progressing a competition to it? If it's broken, let's fix it. If 1.6 is much better, let's help move it along.
Geoff
