Re: Ant vs Maven [Was: Building 3.0 from trunk]

From: Andrus Adamchik (andru..bjectstyle.org)
Date: Mon Feb 26 2007 - 04:58:54 EST

  • Next message: Andrus Adamchik: "Re: Help Needed on Cayenne Geronimo Work"

    On Feb 26, 2007, at 5:32 AM, Aristedes Maniatis wrote:

    > On 26/02/2007, at 12:55 AM, Andrus Adamchik wrote:
    >> * We joined the club of gullible people who bought into the Maven
    >> hype (I thought such thing would never happen to me :-)), so now
    >> we have a common (though crappy) platform for integration of the
    >> code from different projects up and down stream. I remember how
    >> much pain it was to create Maven artifacts out of Ant Cayenne in
    >> the past.
    >
    > Is it that important? Surely we want to be able to make clear
    > decisions about when we want to import a new version of a jar into
    > Cayenne. We import that file, test appropriately, then commit when
    > ready. As for downstream - do we care that much?

    Maven integration is VERY important. Even aside from our early
    efforts to integrate with OpenEJB/Geronimo, which are all maven,
    there are more people than you would think who are using Cayenne-
    Maven. How we do the integration is irrelevant though. If we can
    provide quality and timely Maven artifact builds, build by Ant, fine.

    >> * Maven popularity leaves some (if not much) hope that it will be
    >> fixed someday. (OT: believe it or not, even WebObjects developers
    >> are considering Maven these days!!!)
    >
    > Maybe maven will improve. Or maybe its problems are so structural
    > that it will just be tweaked around the edges and more features
    > added to it. Maybe the problem is that (like ant) it is trying to
    > use XML as a programming/scripting language and failing. But unlike
    > ant, you end up with an XML file nested 25 levels deep and quite
    > incomprehensible. I've never understood why the build script is a
    > good place to keep the timezone in which each developer lives.

    I am not arguing that Maven sucks, in fact I agreed in the quoted
    message :-)

    > If ant was to be used again, I'd be happy to donate any parts of
    > our ant scripts (to do things like build .dmg, integrate subversion
    > build numbers into the manifest, etc) which we use here internally.
    > Some parts might be useful.

    While I admitted that I wasted mine and everybody else's time with
    Maven migration, I refuse to do it again :-) But this shouldn't stop
    better alternatives from being created [1] (and taking place of Maven
    when ready). My requirements for the new system would be this:

    * It should provide all current build and release functionality (Duh!)
    * It should sit in a separate branch until it is ready 100%,
    * It should support the current module layout
    * It should provide a way to publish Maven artifacts

    [1] http://incubator.apache.org/learn/rules-for-revolutionaries.html

    Andrus



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