[armedbear-devel] Maven & ABCL

[Erik Huelsmann]

Hi Alessio,

> I'm in the process of integrating Dynaspring [1] in a
> yet-to-be-released open source utilities project developed together
> with some (ex-)colleagues. The utilities project is built with Maven,
> so in order to use Dynaspring (and transitively ABCL) I had to write a
> simple pom.xml (Maven project descriptor) for ABCL to make it known to
> Maven (i.e. usable as a dependency in Maven projects). For the other
> developers' convenience, it would be nice if the poms were available
> from a publicly accessible Maven repository (Sonatype provides a free
> one, [2]). I'm going to create one there for Dynaspring, but if you're
> ok with it, I can create a separate one for ABCL, and from now on,
> publish ABCL releases there as well. What do you think?

I'm not very familiar wit Maven and its repositories, so I have some
additional questions:

 * Is a maven-user restricted to a single maven repository per
project? In other words, do all dependencies have to be in a single
repository, or can dependencies be downloaded from different
repositories?
 * You choose for this specific Maven repository. Is there a specific
reason? Are they the best (and by which definition of best)? Are they
the most well known?
 * Can the steps for publishing to the repository be built into the
release process? Will it make our release process much heavier, or is
uploading a purely technical step a computer can do with a human just
supervising correct completion of the action? (In the latter case, we
could just script the uploads to our website and the maven repository
and wait a little more than before...)

In general, I think it's a good idea to hook into distribution
mechanisms common to Java developers. Thanks for taking this
initiative!

Regards,


Erik.