On 17/12/2011 20:24, Antonio Petrelli wrote: > Ok, let's do it again :-D > 1. Standardization. Maven strongly encourages to use a standardized > structure. The source should go into src/main/java, the resources in > src/main/resources etc. You can change it, but this is discouraged. With > Ant you always do things differently for different projects.
What benefit is this to the Tomcat community? I see a change, but no benefit. > 2. Modularization. Separation between modules is strong, i.e. one jar-one > source directory. In the case of Tomcat, there is a big big trouble: one > single big source directory. Separating them will be one of the most > important step to do. Why is that an issue? Switching to a single source tree was one of the best changes we ever made. It has been much easier to manage than the multiple source trees we had in the past. The dependencies are known and we have checks in place (via Checkstyle) to ensure that unwanted dependencies are not added. Again, what is the benefit here to the Tomcat community? There has been some interest but very little activity towards greater modularity. If there was more interest in increasing modularity then there might be a case for this but given Tomcat's remit of implementing the Servlet and JSP specs there is very little that could be made modular / optional. Jasper and EL are already optional (well, they can be removed) and pretty much everything else is required by the Servlet spec. > 3. Metadata-driven process. The build process is driven by metadata (where > the source is? where should I deploy it?) and not by commands (compile the > source that is in that point, deploy it in that repository) Again, how does this benefit the Tomcat community? > 4. POMs are (almost) universal. Projects of the same kind have almost the > same content.. How does this benefit the Tomcat community? > 5. Plug-ins do generically what pieces of Ant's script do specifically. For > example take the Maven assembly plugin: via a descriptor you obtain a zip > file to distribute. That sounds like just a different way of doing things. What is the benefit? > 6. When all the metadata is in place, the release process is a matter of > launching: > mvn release:prepare > and > mvn release:perform Right now the release process is: ant release followed by scp / ftp / 'take your pick' the files to the right place and that could be added to the script if we really wanted to (but no-one has felt the need to scratch that itch). In summary, I see a lot of differences but no benefits. Changing to Maven would mean big changes along with some disruption. For the community to make those changes and accept that disruption there needs to be something in return. So far, I haven't seen anything that I would class as a benefit to the community (e.g. faster build process, simpler releases, fewer bugs, etc.). Mark --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@tomcat.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@tomcat.apache.org
