Personally, I'm finding it a little hard to divorce the maven-developer in me here, and see it from an average Joe perspective...
I think it could be great to have the ability to install Maven from yum, apt-get, port, emerge, etc. I think many users who are more interested in developing and building software than they are in using a particular build tool would agree. I know that whenever I pickup a new project from sourceforge or wherever, I often have to jump through hoops to get the thing to build, when all I wanted to do was test some tweak I made to the codebase...I wind up wishing it used maven 2 to build. :-) I get lost for hours sometimes just trying to get the project to build, which is incredibly frustrating. To limit this, I think it would be great to make it as easy as possible for users to get access to Maven without imposing extra hoops to jump through. When I think about my own use case, I don't think I'd install Maven from yum, etc. because I want/need multiple versions, or I want a bleeding-edge version. That's fine; I just install it from a zip, and I'm happy...my use case is already satisfied by that .zip file. However, for the overwhelming majority of users, this is not the case. Sure, they may need Maven 1.x, Maven 2.x, and Ant to live side-by-side, but that's different. As long as it's a reasonably up-to-date version of the software, it should be suitable for their purposes. I guess what I'm really getting at is this: we need to be very careful to determine what's helping our users in all of this. Do they really need multiple versions of Maven on the same machine? In 90% of cases, no. If they do, they have options that are no worse than what they have now. I haven't reviewed the patch in this thread yet, but I am in favor of providing a good ground-up build for Maven and its dependencies that will lend itself to being emerged, port'ed, yum'ed, apt-gotten, etc. If we can do that, there's no reason we couldn't add those packaging styles to the assembly plugin or something similar, and simply produce them alongside all of the other tgz's, etc. that we produce now. It's mostly a one-time cost, and will pay off big time in user-community gains. Just my $0.02. I'm going to take a look at the patch now. :-) -john
