Ralph Goers wrote:
Sylvain Wallez wrote:
By "chronic disease", I was referring to Maven. And it's not specific
to Cocoon, but to many other projects. Maven has brought one new
brillant idea to the Java world, which is artifact repositories (note
though that Linux repositories have existed for a very long time).
But using Maven requires to adhere to the whole thing: repository
management, which is good, but also a declarative under-documented
build system. And Maven is also self-updating, which is a nice idea
on paper but means the buid is not repeatable since you don't know
what is used to build your system.
Wow. I guess you don't like Maven.
There are other alternatives to your complaints - like becoming a
committer there and fixing them.
That is exactly what I wanted to point out with the "Maven sucked too
much energy from Cocoon" argument: I don't want and shouldn't have to
become a committer on the build system as a necessary preliminary to
doing usefull stuff on Cocoon.
Using Ant + Ivy has all the downfalls of GNU Make. Instead of one
"undocumented" (not sure where you get that from) build system you end
up with every build system being different and usually, mostly
undocumented.
Most of the Maven plugins can be rewritten in a couple of Ant lines.
Also, it is possible to have common reusable Ant build files that avoid
rewriting everything from scratch every time. Now it's true that no
community effort has taken place to provide a distribution of such
standard reusable Ant files. Maybe people did not felt the urge to do so
because Ant files to build simple artifacts are so straightforward.
As for the self-updating, dependency management allows you to have
complete control over the artifacts you wish to use. My contribution
to Maven has to continue to make that aspect better.
I now this is work in progress. But not self-updating should be the
default rather than being an intial feature that can be disabled by
specifying the exact version of each and every Maven plugin you want a
fixed-version of (and how do I know which version I want?)
Now I'll shut up since most people here seem to be happy with Maven. I'm
not, let's move on to other debates.
Sylvain
--
Sylvain Wallez - http://bluxte.net
