[Mulgara-dev] Unit test updates

[Paul Gearon]

On 6/19/06, Amit Kapoor <amitkapoor at mindspring.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 18, 2006 at 01:50:33PM -0400, Brian Sletten wrote:
> > Does anyone have a problem with a Maven 2-based solution?
>
>     :) Not at all.

I thought that if I delayed responding to this then Amit might beat me
to the punch.  :-)

I'm concerned about the lack of flexibility of Maven in comparison to
Ant.  Maven isn't so good at multiple targets for different purposes,
while Ant excels at this.  Maven does have an advantage with foreign
package dependencies, but Ant can leverage Ivy for this purpose.

I'm not trying to defend the current build system!  I've never really
liked it at all.  Several years ago I was already complaining about
how the parallels between directories and packages have been
subverted.  This was principally done so that javac directives could
contain a source attribute that looked like "directory/**/*.java",
rather than doing some intelligent work in the build script.  Of
course, my voice wasn't heard there, and at the end of the day, all I
really cared about was whether or not it worked, and didn't interfere
to much with development.  It seemed to do the job OK.

So I agree that the build could be re-done in a much better way.  But
I've yet to see why Maven would be better.  Indeed, from what I know
of Maven, it isn't as well suited to this task as Ant (though
introducing Ivy would help).

Regards,
Paul