A couple of suggestions for useful projects involving the build

[David Jencks <da...@coredevelopers.net>]

Two things that would IMO be quite useful, but may involve significant 
familiarity with maven, are:

1. With a lot of luck, xdoclet 1.2 will be released very soon.  I 
wonder if our xdoclet goals in etc/maven.xml can be replaced with use 
of the maven xdoclet plugin. If you want to try it out, I can point you 
to a release candidate for xdoclet 1.2.

Alternatively, writing whatever is necessary to use xdoclet2 instead is 
a solution with more of a future than continuing with xdoclet 1.x.

2. Currently the version information for dependencies is scattered 
through all the module project.xml files.  This is clearly 
unmaintainable.  It is possible to replace <version>1.2.x.y</version> 
with <version>${whatever.version}</version> and define whatever.version 
in that module's project.properties file, but this doesn't help much, 
since you still have one copy per module.  Maven appears to claim that 
property inheritance ought to work, but it doesn't as of 1.0 rc1. (cf. 
http://nagoya.apache.org/eyebrowse/ReadMsg?listId=149&msgNo=5010  The 
suggestion there of setting the values by j:set in the parent maven.xml 
doesn't work for info needed in the dependencies listed in the 
project.xml file, since these dependencies seem to be evaluated before 
maven.xml) So, this project has two parts:
a. find a way to centralize properties, such as by fixing maven.
b. centralize the dependency versions.

thanks
david jencks