John Farrell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote on 08/08/2003 11:53:03 AM: > Yep, maven cannot know these things. My bitch is particularly with Jelly, at > the moment, which includes 3 jars which cannot be downloaded automatically > and contains no information about where to get them from. In particular, the > Jelly "Getting Started" page states that maven will download all of the > required jars, when it is obvious within seconds of trying to use jelly that > that will not be the case. In those cases, users need details on how to get > the missing dependencies. For example, explicit instructions on the "Getting > Started" page would be polite (see footnote), but it would be much cooler if > when maven tried to download the jar it instead retrieved a message which > told the user "go to this site, download this file, call it this andstick it > here". Yep, that'd be nice, but maven can't know where all possible jar files are stored. The only place it can look is on the remote repo. It does say where its trying to download it from, and the only place to stick it is the local repo.
> The problem is made worse by that fact that maven has naming conventions for > jars which are not followed by the providers of those jars. I just downloaded > the JDBC 2.0 jar from Sun because Jelly depends on "jdbc-2.0.jar". However > the file I downloaded was actually called "jdbc2_0-stdext.jar". I can only > presume that is the one Jelly wants, but maybe there is another. I also need > to download xsdlib-20020414.jar. That sounds like a nightly build of > something I've never heard of. What if I can find xsdlib-1.0.jar? Will that > be good enough? What if I find an archive of xsdlib nightly builds, but it > only goes back 3 months? That's what the project info dependencies page is for. See http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/jelly/libs/swing/dependencies.html for an example. If the project specifies a URL, a link will appear on that page. As for stated dependencies that are supposed to be publicly available, there is a central repository at http://www.ibiblio.org/maven for them. > My point is, if maven is going to dumb down the dependency thing, it's got to > work for dumb people. Dumb people can probably follow instructions on how to Nothing will ever work for dumb people. People are far dumber than software can be smart. > get something, but guessing what jar is meant and figuring out where to get > it from is just an unfair ask. I agree. It is unfair. The jelly project documentation is bad and out of date. > (footnote): While writing this mail, I received other mail telling me that > when they wrote the Getting Started guide, those jars were available for > automatic download but they were later removed. But noone's updated the docs... -- dIon Gillard, Multitask Consulting Blog: http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/dion/
