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

[Ovidiu Feodorov]

Jason T. Greene wrote:
> 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?

 From a dependency management perspective, Ivy and Fragma are pretty 
much the same thing, except obviously the fact that Fragma supports 
generically "attributed" artifacts, which is essential for heterogeneous 
development environments. Not JBoss' case, maybe with the exception of 
JBossWeb and its support for native connector code.

If you really interested in a point-to-point comparison, I could add 
that to the manual.

Fragma supports the concept of "generic repository", so it will support 
Maven repositories, if there's interest for it.


>
>> 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.

The manual is outdated.

You mean "Ant" integration, not Java, right?

Java integration works, Fragma uses itself for dependency management, so 
it's got to work.
>
>> 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).

I am up for it.