John Farrell wrote:

> Maven itself can't know about all jars, but the developers who make the 
> dependencies know. I suggest that (a) maven get a feature which allows it to 
> retrieve from the repository information about an undownloadable jar, and (b) 
> developers who depend on such jars put such information in the repository. 
> All it has to be is a short note saying "Sun does not allow this jar to be 
> distributed automatically. Please go to this page to get it." Of course, no 
> rush, I would like to see some bugs fixed first, but this would be a whole 
> lot nicer than "no such jar aaaarrrgggh.'

Maven has most of the information needed to print out an polite message.
<dependency> has <url> element, which is good enough if the jar is
available in the web directly. It's a bit more complicated if the user
needs to accept a licence before the actual download is possible.
Of the top of my head:
<dependency>
  <id>j2ee</id>
  <version>1.3</version>
  <type>jar</type>
  <url>http://java.sun.com/j2ee/sdk_1.3</url>
  <downloadInstructions>You need to accept the license and download J2EE
distiribution for your platform. Install it and copy j2ee.jar found in
the lib/ directory of the installed distribution into the following
location: ${localRepoLocation}</downloadInstructions>
</dependency>

${localRepoLocation} bit is easy, because it can be derived from
maven.local.repo, type, id and version.

> BTW, how does Maven depend on jelly when jelly is in such a sorry state? 

Jelly runtime and core tag libraries are healthy enough for Maven to
use. We don't care much about other tag libraries let alone examples...

> Is there an internal release which is not available to the public at
> large?

Not at all. What good would that be?

R.


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