We've been living with parallel Ant and Maven build systems for 6 to 9
months now, and most developers are mostly onto Maven, but some still
use Ant from time to time.
I just polled the rest of my development team for who still uses our
ant build system and why.
So Maven core developers, Here are some of the reasons I heard:
1) I can't do the equivalent of ant -projecthelp
Pointing out that all the common maven commands are documented on the
wiki doesn't seem to alleviate this concern, which I admit really
puzzles me. Has anyone else encountered this complaint about maven? I
think the ability to easy get a list of configured plugins within the
pom would be really handy.
2) We have lots of ant run-* targets I like to use.
My response: Letting them know of the mvnrun script I've checked into
our source tree that effectively runs the following:
mvn compile exec:java $MVNOPT -Dexec.mainClass="$CLASSNAME" -
Dexec.args="$ARG"
This allows the user to type:
mvnrun MyMainClass --args
The script searches for the MyMainClass.java file, figures out the
full package name, and fills in the parameters above.
3) We use the ant tags target to run etags to create emacs TAGS files
I pointed these developers to a mktags script that does the same
thing. I also added 'mvn generate-sources' to the script first, to
make sure the tags catch those generated java files.
Just some feedback,
Josh
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Joshua ChaitinPollak | Software Engineer
Kiva Systems, Inc., 225 Wildwood Ave, Woburn, MA 01970
