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Date: Tue, 15 Mar 2011 09:47:28 -0700 (PDT)
From: Glen Mazza <glen.mazza@gmail.com>
To: dev@cxf.apache.org
Message-ID: <1300207648056-3709850.post@n5.nabble.com>
In-Reply-To: <201103150920.23568.dkulp@apache.org>
References: <201103150920.23568.dkulp@apache.org>
Subject: Re: Proposal: drop ant build.xml files for samples requiring extra
 stuff.....
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(1)'s my first choice, I can help with the Mavenization of the samples
(standard directory structure) if we go that route.  Reasons:

1.)  Providing Ant builds is for the benefit of those developers whose
capabilities are between what is needed to use Ant and what is needed to use
Maven (anyone past the latter is going to be using Maven, and those before
the former aren't going to be helped with Ant builds).  This is a very
narrow range of capabilities, you won't find many developers between these
two levels--but at any rate, a range that's well below the capabilities
needed to meaningfully understand the CXF samples anyway.  So the target
audience we're trying to help by providing Ant builds doesn't really exist. 
The natural complexity of CXF gives us the luxury of not needing to provide
Ant scripts for our samples.

2.)  Having an Ant-only developer use Maven provides no harm to that
developer.  It's more important for the developer to understand Maven than
anything CXF has to offer.  Being able to download Maven and type "mvn clean
install" or whatever is not at all wasted effort, and from a cost/benefit
analysis, it's about as much a slam-dunk decision any developer can make. 
It's an easy investment that makes it much easier for CXF committers to help
the developer later in his work.

3.) In my view, for the open source model to work, it has to be for the
benefit of not just the user but the volunteer committers.  But no committer
today would benefit by maintaining Ant build scripts, it's just busywork. 
Indeed, having Ant scripts hampers our ability to optimize and modernize the
samples, because of the additional need to update the Ant build scripts as
well.  (Needing to update the Ant scripts is probably the very reason why
the samples themselves have not been following the standard Maven directory
format.)  RESTEasy and Jersey have already freed their developers from
needing to maintain Ant build scripts--they're Maven-only, and so their
examples can be quickly and easily updated.  

4.) The discussion is increasingly no longer about "Ant and Maven", but
"Maven and OSGi" (and, some day in the future, "OSGi and something else")
and it's difficult to cleanly focus on the latter two by trying to maintain
all three build technologies. 

Glen

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