[jboss-dev] Why Maven sucks (part 1)

[Jason T. Greene]

Ovidiu Feodorov wrote:
> 
> Thank you, Rémy
> 
> The system I am talking about I delegates the build tasks to ant, 
> feeding it with the appropriate dependency information. In this respect, 
> your build can be as simple as "ant", no need for maven commands.

Awesome. This is exactly how it should be. The whole idea of limiting a 
project to 5 build commands is flawed. Using "profiles" to solve this 
limitation is also flawed (and confusing).

How does your system compare to Ivy (besides support for native code 
integration)? Do you have any plans to support pulling from maven2 repos 
as a stop-gap?

> In order to implement this, the dependency manager recursively walks the 
> dependency tree and detects the transitive closure of your project's 
> dependencies, "flattens" the dependency tree, and in its current 
> implementation, it just bails out with a loud error message when it 
> detects a version conflict. It doesn't try to "guess" anything, even 
> that heuristics can be optionally plugged in (I am personally afraid of 
> heuristics, they have a habit of yielding unexpected results, so I won't 
> encourage that)
> 
> Here's the manual: http://fragma.sourceforge.net/FragmaUserGuide.pdf

Do you have any more information on how the Java integration works (or 
is planned to work)? These sections are empty in the manual.

> As I said before, my proposal is to use it to configure a small 
> peripheral project, and if conclusions prove to be positive, decide what 
> to do from there, in case you guys decide to go this route.

I have to say, I really like the idea of having a build system that can 
be adjusted to fit our needs, as opposed to changing our needs to fit 
the build system (maven).

-- 
Jason T. Greene
JBoss, a division of Red Hat