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dion
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07:48, Saturday, 22 May 2004
Howard's posted a bit more about Moving away from Maven
Since his blog requires a Blogger account to post, I'm commenting here.
Simplicity:
Even though Maven is not a simple beast (lets not pretend that Hivemind is either), it does make quite a few things simple to the user of the build. Knowing that a project will always be able to have a standard set of functionality on it, removes the usual Ant build file reading and understanding most people go through when trying to start with a project.
However, he's fallen into the same trap with his proposed Ant build file, he's now got Ant XML documents pretending to be programs with the <import> tags.
Consistency:
This is probably one area maven shines above howards example build file. He now has his own common 'jar' and 'download' code, not a shared consistent one.
Efficiency
I'll agree Maven's not as slim as Ant, but then Ant's not as slim as make.exe either. As for needing to fork the unit tests, maybe if there was a bug report or a user list posting someone could fix this. Without it, there's no chance.
Feedback
I agree Maven sucks at this, but I still haven't seen a failure error message from an imported ant build file to compare it with.
On to the example maven and comparative build files.
- I believe the javacc plugin bug was fixed. So that removes the need for the maven.xml altogether.
- If you want to compare sizes, at least be consistent enough to show all the files, e.g. the jar-module.xml and javacc.xml
- Also be consistent about what you put licenses on as well. The project.properties file has a license taking up most of it, but no licenses are shown for build.xml
- project.xml contains lots of useful stuff for me that's not shown in the Ant build file.
In summary, yes Maven will be more verbose than hand crafting personal Ant build files, and yes the error message reporting in Maven is woeful.
I'm still waiting to see the build file that Howard comes up with to produce his "Integrated pretty documentation (with navigation)".
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