On Fri, 8 Aug 2003 11:23 am, Luke Taylor wrote:
> > Where is the documentation explaining this and
> > telling you how to fix it?

> "2) JARs that don't exist in the local or remote repositories will
> result in an error. In either case, you'll have to download those
> yourself and manually place them in  $MAVEN_HOME/repository"
>
> The repository is now in the user's home directory by default, not
> MAVEN_HOME, but the information is there pretty much at the entry point
> in the documentation.

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 and stick it 
here".

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?

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 
get something, but guessing what jar is meant and figuring out where to get 
it from is just an unfair ask.

(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.

Dr John Farrell
Senior Dumb Person
Caterpillar MineStar Project

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