[Laszlo-dev] Upgrading some of our build tools

[David Nault]

Ant isn't perfect, but it's flexible, common, simple, and reliable.  
Maven is, by many accounts, a huge pain in the keister.

Webtop used Ivy for dependency management for a while. Maintaining the  
local repository was a hassle. It slowed down the build process.  
Everyone but me hated it. Eventually we ripped it out and went back to  
checking in the jars. My new stance is that in many cases dependency  
management is a problem where the cure is just as bad as the disease.

David


On Jan 21, 2010, at 12:22 AM, Rami Ojares / AMG Oy <rami.ojares at archon.fi 
 > wrote:

>> Maven would be much better, but the compiler uses some JARs which  
>> are probably not available in public repositories.
>>
> Maven's "coolest" feature is it's weakest link.
> In my experience the dependencies of a project almost always end up
> being unorthodox.
> Say there is one nasty bug in some lib which you fix in your own copy
> but maybe the project is not accepting your update (the project  
> might be
> dead and there is nobody updating). Or it might take a year for the
> update to be published or most likely you don't have the time to share
> your update upstream.
> That's why it's best to stick with your own local copies of  
> dependencies.
>
> But what I think might be a good thing is dependency management in  
> general.
> And there is a separate project for that in apache called ivy.
> Also I quess maven can be used without resorting to public dependency
> repositories.
> I am not sure because I have my own personal build system (for better
> AND worse).
>
> - rami
>
>> On Jan 21, 2010, at 4:15 AM, Max Carlson wrote:
>>
>>
>>> +1 from me.  Anything we can do to use more modern libraries is a  
>>> win. It would be even better if we could switch to Maven and take  
>>> advantage of the sweet automatic JAR dependency management - but  
>>> that's a much larger job.
>>>
>>> Regards,
>>> Max Carlson
>>> OpenLaszlo.org