[whisker] Tooling (for Maven and more...)

[Robert Burrell Donkin <rd...@apache.org>]

Whisker[1] assists projects shipping products assembled from lots of 
components. For example, Apache James 3.0 includes over 150 
dependencies. At this scale, we found that manual maintenance of NOTICE, 
LICENSE and CRYPTO notices becomes a major burden.

The initial code base features a command line application which 
generates reports from velocity templates. It works okay but tooling 
them for integration (with build systems like Maven and Ant) would allow 
continuation integration to catch new issues as they emerge.

I'd like to take the chance to review, revise and improve this initial 
code base whilst working on the tooling. I invite people to jump in with 
ideas, suggestions and opinions.


I think we're probably going to want to factor out tooling (for each 
build system) from shared analysis and synthesis. I think my first move 
will be to outline a multi-module Maven build (excluding the legacy code).

Opinions? Ideas? Improvements? Objections?

Robert

[1] http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator/rat/whisker/trunk/
[2] http://maven.apache.org
[3] http://ant.apache.org