Beeing a fan of open and free source and all I want to make sure that Maven will run properly on at least one of all the free runtimes that's out there. So here the other day with a few moments to spare I took it for a spin.

The first snag I ran into was that of course Sun's javac won't run on a non-Sun JVM so I had to brush the dust off of our old Eclipse compiler. The Eclipse compiler is a Java compiler written in Java with out any dependencies. So after adding this to the root POM:

    
      
        maven-compiler-plugin
        
          eclipse
        
      
    
  ]]>

to select the Eclipse compiler and after that it all worked (as expected)!

Now this is there I'm supposed to include some summary and performance comparisons between the diffrent free VMs but of course I've lot the file with all my notes so I'll update the entry later next time I get some spare time.

I used JamVM as the virtual machine and executed Maven 2 with this command:

JAVACMD=`which jamvm` m2 clean:clean install

I've already looked into what's requred for getting Maven 2 into at least Debian, it beeing my personal distro of choice. I've gotten almost all of the dependencies either packaged as a normal Java Debian packages or building as a part of my "m2-bootstrap" package so hopefully with either more spare time or more volunteers (wink wink, nudge nudge) Maven 2 should be available as a Debian package ... sometime.