Greeting fellow Java hackers,
It's that time of year again when students ease up on their studies and help contribute to the open source community through the Google Summer of Code. I've been selected this year to build project which could be used to help build a java projects dependencies (and their dependencies). The plan is to build a maven plugin to both determine the dependencies and try to build them up taking into account different build systems/source control/etc [1]. Doing so can both confirm that a project is truly open source and reaffirm that it is still possible to recreate a useful binary (from scratch) which could have been created years ago. One additional use case that may be useful for open source projects is the ability to test a source release, if it included multiple projects not built with a single command.
If your project has some arcane build ritual, I encourage you to let me know so I can take them into consideration.
I'm looking forward to a great summer!
Cheers,
Andrew