Re: [Zookeeper-user] Moving to maven

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

There's no point in reading the entire book.  Just the first few  
chapters which are an easy read.  Skim the chapter titles and read  
what looks interesting to you afterward.

I've listed below some of the reasons why one would want to move to  
maven.   Ant is a good build system and is also easy to learn.   
However, you would be surprised to see how creative people can get  
with it.  I have gone through many, many, Ant build systems and I can  
say that none of them are the same.  It is always a frustrating  
experience trying to grok yet another Ant setup; all maven setups are  
the same because of the convention over configuration paradigm.

I've worked on many Ant projects and it falls down when a project gets  
sophisticated. IMO, ZooKeeper is on the precipice of build complexity;  
you already have your own IDL compiler.  As you move on you want to  
focus on the code, not the build system.  From experience I know that  
Ant is brittle.

Maybe your future plans for ZooKeeper are simple.  Maybe you intend to  
just deliver a single monolithic jar to your users and force them to  
use a configuration system of your own design.  If that's the case  
then you are right to stay with Ant.


Regards,
Alan


On Dec 7, 2007, at 12:21 PM, Andrew Kornev wrote:

> Hello,
>
> Alan! Thanks for the Maven books links!
>
> Maven does have a number of advantages over Ant (and for people like  
> us who
> enjoy life long learning the indisputable advantage of Maven is of  
> course
> the time it's going to take to actually learn it :-)
>
> However, for a simple project like zookeeper with no external  
> dependencies
> save for the ubiquitous junit, I wonder if switching to Maven would  
> add any
> value other than having the project "mavenized"?
>
> Please don't get me wrong: I'm not arguing that Ant is better than  
> Maven,
> nor do I have any specific objections to moving to Maven. I'm trying  
> to get
> a better idea how much a happier man I will be with Maven than I  
> currently
> am with Ant :-)
>
> Regards,
> Andrew
>
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: zoo...@li... [mailto:zookeeper-user-
>> bo...@li...] On Behalf Of Alan D. Cabrera
>> Sent: Thursday, December 06, 2007 9:45 AM
>> To: zoo...@li...
>> Subject: [Zookeeper-user] Moving to maven
>>
>> 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
>>
>>
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>