Comment by nicpottier | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nicpottier | Hacker News Reader

Yes, Maven sucks, but for large projects the dependency management is rather nice. Java as a language is terribly dependency crazy, and being able to add three lines to your pom and get a new library in along with all its dependencies is a good thing. Though I'll now get flamed for not fully understanding every library dependency I'm importing in, which is fair, but hasn't been an issue for me for the three years I've been using Maven on various projects.

But that said, Maven has a build tool absolutely fucking sucks.. I much much prefer ant, and totally agree that mvn can be completely retarded and suck away a half day randomly.

If there was an ant alternative to deal with the library dependency problem then I'd be all for it. It seems that now that ibiblio exists, there should be ample opportunity to do this, basically rewrite mvn but use the existing repos.

But really, this single command makes mvn worth the trouble for me: % mvn -DdownloadSources=true -DdownloadJavadocs=true eclipse::eclipse

Give me another tool that does the same thing by me just specifying all my direct dependencies and version numbers and we can talk.

-Nic

There are at least two:

1) The Maven Ant tasks: http://maven.apache.org/ant-tasks/index.html 2) Ivy (now part of the Ant project): http://ant.apache.org/ivy/

We use Ant+Ivy, and although it has some quirks Ivy works well enough for dependencies.

Do either one of those actually pull down the appropriate sources and javadocs, and update my Eclipse classpath to include them with one command? I'm actually asking, not being snarky, as it doesn't look built in with Ivy and the few little projects claiming to do it don't look very active, what has been your experience?

As I said, that is the one big carrot still keeping me in mvn camp.

I've worked with ivy on a project a few years ago and the integration with eclipse worked fine for the classpath and sources. I didn't check about the javadocs.

Ivy is mainly a tool to work with ant, so it makes some sense that IDE integration is not in the same project, but as far as I could see, ivy and the eclipse plugin are written by the same people.

The eclipse plugin was actually one of the reasons for choosing ivy over maven, because at the time maven was moving to 2.0 and its eclipse plugin was not yet available or stable. The other reason was the documentation. At the time there seemed to be more documentation about ivy than about all functionalities of maven together.

As I mentioned elsewhere in the thread, buildr manages dependencies just like maven, including the ability to download sources and javadocs, and also has an ant integration library that works really well. Finally, buildr supports generating eclipse .classpath and .project files for eclipse, though the IDE integration obviously isn't as good because the project is younger and has less community support.

maven sucks ESPECIALLY on large, mission critical projects where repeatability and reliability are primary concerns

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