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Comment by jjnoakes | Hacker News Reader

Running scripts doesn't imply "snowflake builds" - one can just as easily write duplicate plugins that are a mess, and one can also just as easily write encapsulated scripts that do one job and do it well.

It's all about the quality of the developers.

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It's not "just as easy". A maven plugin is necessarily a maven module, a first-class module like any of your libraries; unless you go out of your way to make it not, it has versioning, tagging and the like. Even more importantly, since the plugin itself is built with maven, it naturally has dependencies and unit tests, arranged in the same familiar structure as the rest of your code. Everything guides you towards good development practice; of course you could manage your scripts in the same way, but you'd have to do so by hand, and with the best of intentions I've never seen any team that used scripts have the discipline to manage them properly.

Good developers can make good things with bad tools and bad developers can make bad things with good tools yes, but even so, tooling and defaults are extremely important.

> I've never seen any team that used scripts have the discipline to manage them properly

And I'll throw in my personal experience too, which is the opposite: I've never seen any team that used Maven and had the discipline to manage it properly.

Anecdotes don't really get you too far.

Unfortunately this is pretty much the problem you will get. It doesn't have to be about good or bad developers, even good developers will start to apply their own flavor and smart solutions in the build scripts and you will end up with very different way of doing things.

Anyone remember using Ant with Java? Same thing I would say. Maven is convention over configuration for a reason.

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