[DISCLAIMER: this article contains some rude language sections]
Just want to express my growing hate about maven2 and its uncertainty..
Howard Lewis Ship brings it to a point:
"when Maven is useful it is very useful, but when it gets in your way, it totally blocks you"Maven is a tool which you really don't if you actually love it (sometimes even i do, especially if you working on open source projects and you want to test/patch things) or hate.
The last point this week that makes me writing this article is the javax.jta shit.. well thats so stupid.
This javax.jta is protected by some SUN (look at "JAVA" in your stock chart btw) licence and you have to install this module yourself.. well.. we are in 2007 not in 1997.. wake up!!
Why don't they (maven) just build in a license policy in their reactor so people can decide and agree on licencing-terms themselves the first time they access a protected resource?
Don't want to mix concerns but the OSGi Bundle Repository effort (RFC-112) supports this kind of licencing as a build-in-step.
Sure this one is pretty old but it stopped me for about a day or so because i really believed it was me doing something wrong.. but actually you just HAVE TO install this crappy api (sorry for terminology) yourself.
And Maven2 does not tell about why artifacts are not do not exist. They just tell you that you should install it yourself. But this is the case if you mispelled something in one of your pom.xml, configuration.xml, server.xml or your local repository or somewhere.. maybe you have just a bad day and this kind of things just work the next day.. the thing is:
YOU NEVER KNOW
Not sure how much money you can waste with another build-tool (ant,rake,make or whatever) but i know that maven2 can really kick you in your ass..
Next time i'll write in a less hot many - hopefully.