[Zookeeper-user] Moving to maven

[Alan D. C. <li...@to...>]

I'd like to suggest moving to Maven.  It has a number of advantages  
over Ant.  Some of my favorites:

- easier for external projects to use ZooKeeper (via maven repositories)
- no need to checkin jars into the SVN repository
- easy plugins to build IntelliJ and Eclipse projects
- easy plugins to build OSGi bundles
- future plugins to deploy OSGi bundles to OBRs

Maven relies on "convention over configuration".  This means  that  
ZooKeeper will be organized along the same lines as most other Open  
Source projects.  This makes it easier for other communities to  
understand how the ZooKeeper project is constructed.  To be sure Ant  
has wide appeal but I have to say, from my experience with Geronimo,  
that you would be surprised at all the different ways Ant build  
projects can be built.

I am happy to convert this project to use Maven.  It will require  
some significant restructuring.  I recommend that I do the work in a  
sandbox for the team to review.  Using patches might prove to be  
error prone in this particular case.


Regards,
Alan