On 3/23/12 6:47 AM, Matthias-Christian Ott wrote:
Hi, I have been assigned to a legacy Java project, which uses several messed up Ant buildfiles. I'm going to replace or clean up the build system as part of project maintainance. I read that Maven (similar to other language-specific package management software) has been a problem for Debian for a long time and that Debian struggles with the general Java software packaging mentality which often ignores system wide package managers. One of the goals for the project is to make software packaging and distribution easier and automatic. Gentoo and Fedora seem to support Maven and Ant, but prefer Ant. Is that also true for Debian? If so, are there any preferred build target naming conventions, like [1]? Regards, Matthias-Christian [1] https://wiki.apache.org/ant/TheElementsOfAntStyle
I can tell you that of all the projects I have worked with for years and all those my friends work with, I have yet to find anyone who uses the Maven that is packaged with a distribution. The common practice is to have Ant + Ivy, Maven, or Gradle + Ivy using a repository outside the OS package management system's own packages. Coupling a Java project to using the Java libraries packaged with the current version of your operating system's offerings is generally avoided, as you invariably need a library or a version of a library that is not available.
Maven is pretty handy when you lay out your project using the conventions that Maven chooses, but getting used to Maven's Build Lifecycle[0] is often an adjustment. I often prefer Ant + Ivy, mostly because Ant is so straightforward and Ivy gives me the transitive dependency management that was always Maven's one cool feature which made people put up with the build lifecycle hassle and the need to create Maven plugins for even the most trivial tasks at times. You can google "maven versus ant" to see a number of writeups about the tradeoffs between those choices.
[0] - http://maven.apache.org/guides/introduction/introduction-to-the-lifecycle.html
Regards, -- Barry Hawkins All Things Computed email: barry@alltc.com twitter: barryhawkins blog: http://barryhawkins.com/blog site: http://alltc.com