January 25, 2006
Why I hate maven
To quote the great Fred Eaglesmith "49 tons of diesel locomotive couldn't bring me back to you".
I have reached the stage of hating maven, I used to just mildly dislike it. In fact, if I had the time right now, I might just move my dependency management to Ivy. That isn't going to happen yet though.
- The useful plugins are all in beta
- There is close to no documentation for any plugin I want to use
- When I ask the user's list for lessons learned/documentation/whatever you want to call it - I don't even get a "you ignorant slut" for an answer.
- When I tried to get the code for the war task through svn - the war task is NO LONGER IN THE SVN REPOSITORY
- I can't get the scope of transitive dependencies
So, now all I use maven for is to build an eclipse classpath that I then edit so that my regular attributes (like src and docs) are in it.
I have written a nifty common war task though - although it uses excludesfile. What do you bet excludesfile gets deprecated in the next version of Ant? It would be just my luck.
Posted by liz at 02:37 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 14, 2005
Build/release
Until we find somebody who wants to do it, I have been named acting Build/Release Engineer at my new shop. This is to go along with my more formal title of Toolsmith and person who is available for anybody to work with (I guess that isn't a real title). They decided that I was the best person to be the acting B/R person because I am terribly interested in getting agile to play nicely with CMMI 3 (moving to CMMI 4 in the next year). Reasonable decision.
But, as usual, there is a problem here. I have No idea what a build/release engineer does when you also have 2 configuration engineers on the project. For some reason, I can't see how you can be one without being the other. Right now, I am automating the build process, but I would be doing that anyway in my role as toolsmith. If anybody who reads this (and there aren't that many readers) has a good definition of what the various people do - I would love to read the defs.
Maven2: We are giving up on maven 2 except for library management. I don't like a whole lot of things about it, but what I dislike the most is that it seems to believe that if you are managing with maven, you want to manage everything with maven. Well, all of you maven people, I don't want maven writing over my classpath file. I want it to update it. I don't want it to overwrite my project file either. And I certainly am not going to trust my code to a project that is averaging 100 bugreports a day after it is released. It is nice that they decided to rewrite maven - but they need better quality control.
I am refactoring the stuff I wrote 2 weeks ago. My partner in crime (even if he is across the whole damn country) is trying to get me to look at ivy. I am not sure if we can get Ivy to do what he seems to want it to do.
I got XPlanner working today. I am going to install it on a real machine tomorrow. I then will decide what we want to do with it.
Posted by liz at 04:52 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 02, 2005
Maven (yet again)
Hey, I used to go crazy writing about firebird. Well, I don't have a chance to play with firebird right now, instead I am busy screwing around with maven2. I have pretty much given up on it.
Of course, it is also possible that I am an idiot and that eclipse plugin code is beautiful and I can't figure out how it should be tested because I am a twit. Many people would probably agree there. BUT - I did ask another programmer to look at it and he said something like "You aren't going to try and extend THAT?????? Are you?????" This is not a case of "Not invented by me". This is a case where there are 5 unittests, named unittest1,2...5. and none of them test anything other than if the code throws an exception. Thank you, that is not what I call a reasonable unit test. Also, the code is not easily testable because it takes (I think) 10 parameters to construct the class I was going to extend. Somebody up there does not approve of dependency injection.
In other words, they wrote legacy code.
So, I am letting the eclipse plugin build a file that I will never use. I am then pulling a dom from it. I am then comparing it with a dom from a .classpath file that I have already written. Doms are then being merged.
Interestingly enough the artifact class does not build a good string for a jar name. Silly shit like that. 200 messages a day since they released Maven 2...and too many of them are jira cases. The plugin left my eclipse projects uncompilable.
So, I will do what I can - and then decide whether I want to rewrite the plugin. I doubt it. Maybe for maven 3?
Posted by liz at 02:44 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack