Yes, the documentation is not the best. However, maven is a life saver when trying to manage a medium to large-scale project. Due to this fact of my life, adding an open source library that is not located on maven is a pain.
The advantage of maven is not only the automatic loading of dependencies, but also imposes a standard directory structure, which means that I can script to use any library used, internal or open.
Biggest Maven Cons:
- very verbose command line. Documentation
- is mysterious and scattered.
- no universal help
However, my solution to many of these problems is to use a custom ant build.xml file with my standard mvn targets defined as simpler ant targets (which also allows me to add help text to my own.)
Update:
I really have to say that the documentation is mysterious. Most of my experience with a typical maven developer on documentation is typical of this exchange:
Me: "I do not understand how to do this, and the code behaves very badly."
Them: "The suggested way to resolve this is to load the DTD into the question and use the catalog recognizer. See the" catalogs "property at http://mojo.codehaus.org/xml-maven-plugin/validation.html " (Their suggestion includes several pages with more than one complete example)
Me: Amazing. RTFM This will make this plugin more useful for users who do not have time to decrypt the manual if a good example has been provided for this very common usecase.
They: I'm sorry, but I can not follow you. The "directory properties" documentation (see Link above) clearly shows how to configure the use of the directory file.
Me: As my friend, a smart guy who works on google, he said the following: "Yes, the documentation says exactly how to do it, if you know how to do it."
Pat
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