Re: Another Maven nugget

>>
>> you don't depend on your network being up all the time. Every  
>> user  has a local maven repo and typically, you have to do one  
>> build to get  all the plugins. After that you don't need the  
>> network. Also running  with --no-plugin-updates might save you  
>> some (failing) lookups.
>>
> Until the first time somebody adds a new dependency to the pom.xml?

Correct.

But frankly, I haven't worked all that many jobs where I wasn't  
connected to the Internet or some corporate network (which could have  
it's own repo) all the time. Being offline is really the exception to  
the rule. And in order to have this particular problem with Maven2,  
you'd have to be offline and somebody must have introduced a new  
dependency that can only be resolved by connecting to a public  
repository. Unless your project is really fresh, rapidly evolving and  
you travel all the time, this does not seem to be such a big issue.

>
> I dunno, I guess there were just too many times - when I was first  
> introduced to Maven - that
> the response to a build problem was "Oh, just run it two or three  
> times, it'll eventually download
> everything it needs and then it'll work."  Ugh.  That just strikes  
> me as incredibly sketchy and
> give me an unfavorable impression right out of the gate. :-)

 From what I hear, Maven1 had more problems with this. When you were  
first introduced to Maven, was it v1 or v2?

In any way, I am quite happy with most things Maven2 does. Some are  
quirky or not as useful as they could be, but it beats coding Ant  
scripts for standard tasks hands down. If you are using Maven in a  
corporate multiproject environment, it can also help unifying the  
build system(s), because it encourages you to use certain conventions  
for organizing your projects. I have seen companies having a  
different build system and different source tree conventions in every  
little subproject - Maven could have helped them to save a lot of  
money, by avoiding the duplication of effort for writing the custom  
build scripts and the developer's learning curve, because they need  
to adjust to yet another set of ill defined, non-standardized set of  
Ant scripts.

Of course Maven2 isn't a silver bullet. I just happen to like it.

-hendrik