Salut Nicolas, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
Le mar, 30/03/2004 à 05:02 -0500, David Walluck a écrit :Ralph Apel wrote:What about a "maven" section, for maven itself and "mavenized" packages?I thought we would not bother mantaining a maven repository and instead replace it with rpm resolution (for now this can even be done with System.exec()). I think this would be less work than constantly maintaining a maven repository, but it's up for debate.I'd rather we focus on the general java framework the Debian wiki is about, and "teach" maven packages to use whatever resolution mechanism we agree on later. Of course this will be less painful if someone with deep maven knowledge (ie not me) checks the competing proposals for maven compatibility now. Short-term maven packages will remain the oddball they are now.
My impression from trying to talk about software management (i.e. package management, something different from software distribution alone) with Maven developers was that they don't care, maven works for them, and that was pretty much the end of it. They had a lot of trouble understanding why people would want to build from source, mantain distribution-specific changes, or avoid grabbing stuff from some unsigned binary only repository off some webpage somewhere.
My explanation is that in the Windows world, Maven beats anything people have ever seen in terms of software distribution. So when you try to tell them that there are better ways to do such things, and they have been used on Linux for a while, you get shouted at because you're threatening the new hype/consulting revenue model :) Some people had a hard time grasping that neither the 'source-only' nor 'binary-only' approach fits everyone. Software distribution systems on Linux usually evolved to support both, because there are mighty good reasons to do so.
Thus, I would not expect that much support from the core Maven community, unless they have managed to wrap their minds around providing sources for the binaries as well, for example. I think that they have a few years to go, till they reinvent apt-get/urpmi/fink/emerge for Java in Maven 2.0. :)
OTOH, some people told me that writing Maven plugins was rather easy, so I assume it would be possible to hook up Maven somehow to work with native packaging systems, instead of working around them.
In order for that to happen, though, we need to work something stable out for the 'Common Java Packaging' effort, as Nicolas says. I'm glad there is some progress on the descriptor front, btw.
cheers, dalibor topic