Re: Maven or not (was: Libraries in 'external')

[Jeremias Maerki <de...@jeremias-maerki.ch>]

<rant>
Don't let yourself be influenced too much by my statement/rant since I
cannot be considered a big contributor to PDFBox but: I hate Maven. (Ivy
is not much better). There's nothing worse than when you check out a
project as a newbie and it doesn't build successfully just because some
third-party artifact server is currently down. Or the Maven build gets a
little further each time you run it but without ever getting to a
successful end. Just let me state that I've discarded open source
projects before because they didn't build out of the box. I'm sure I'm
not the only one and that's bad for adoption. Maven/Ivy are fine in a
controlled environment with a highly available, local repository. But
IMO they should be banned for open source projects. Those must be:
"svn co <url>, build, the happy end". Furthermore, I doubt that all
Maven-using Apache projects have their dependency trees under control
license-wise. I've seen third-parties being downloaded that I was not
able to determine the license for, some decidedly (L)GPLish. Maven is
incapable of providing a license-report. You're not even sure if all
downloaded JARs are ever used/needed or not.
</rant>

On 13.01.2009 18:57:23 Jukka Zitting wrote:
<snip/>
> I think it would be a good idea to switch to Maven or (if that's too
> radical) use a dependency management tool like Ivy that can
> automatically download the external dependencies at build time.



Jeremias Maerki