Re: Dissolving Apache NMaven From ASF Incubator

> I have a number of perspectives on this, and have taken the time  
> traveling over the last few days to reflect on this decision.
>
> As a mentor, I can recognise the podling in its current form is not  
> working. Contributions, patches, and questions have gone largely  
> ignored this year, and development stalled after the migration to a  
> new trunk. For a long time we have assumed that a kick in that  
> direction was all that was needed to get it going again, but only  
> small steps have been taken. Something clearly needs to change.
>
> I don't believe the move you've suggested will make visibility,  
> community involvement and a steady release schedule any more likely  
> than it is now - they simply require a conscious decision and group  
> effort to do so which could equally be achieved here.
>

> My primary role in the project at the moment is as a user,  
> distributor and occasional developer. There are two reasons your  
> proposal won't satisfy our needs in that regard:
> - we are committed to and required to maintain the code in an  
> independent environment
> - we require integration with Archiva for the search and management  
> functionality
>
> Do you have some alternative proposition here? I realise these may  
> not be your personal "itches", but there are no technical reasons  
> they can't be achieved by other community members that are  
> interested in doing so while other work continues in the areas  
> you've described.
>
> I personally agree with the overarching technical direction you've  
> described. In the long term, I see the .NET portions of this project  
> doing much of the work independently, and this is also consistent  
> with discussions I've had with others. However, Byldan hadn't seemed  
> much more than an experiment to date - could you elaborate on where  
> you think it stands to be able to provide a solution to Maven users  
> today, or what kind of effort is required to bring it to that point?
>

> Thanks,
> Brett
>
> On 14/11/2008, at 8:14 AM, Shane Isbell wrote:
>
>> I'd like to let the general NMaven community know that we are  
>> dissolving
>> NMaven from the Apache Incubator and will be moving the project to  
>> Sonatype
>> Forge (http://sonatype.org) over the next week. I can't speak for all
>> members of the NMaven PPMC but my personal reasons are that after 2  
>> years in
>> the incubator, we have failed to gain traction with the community.  
>> The
>> community involvement was quite active while NMaven was at  
>> sourceforge,
>> drying up very quickly after moving to ASF.
>>
>> Looking back, I think there were a number of reasons for this.  
>> First, I
>> don't think the Apache brand name has as much appeal to the .NET  
>> crowd, so
>> it was easy for us to get buried. Second, we tied NMaven to a Maven  
>> 2.1
>> snapshot to support Visual Studio, and thus were stuck at a point  
>> where we
>> couldn't do a release. Finally, I took a divergent path from Maven
>> implementation, in part to solve problems with lack of toolchain  
>> support and
>> versionless artifact file names, and this made it difficult for Maven
>> developers to understand and to make contributions. The 0.15  
>> release earlier
>> in the year was designed to address these problems. Yet we still  
>> didn't gain
>> much traction with the user or developer community, pointing to  
>> something
>> more fundamental.
>>
>> Given these problems, I'd like to take NMaven to Sonatype Forge,  
>> giving it a
>> fresh start, getting back visibility, community involvement and a  
>> steady
>> release schedule. Now in regards to the future plans.
>>
>> A number of .NET developers I talked to said that they while they  
>> liked
>> Maven and the concept of the Project Model, they didn't want to  
>> have to
>> install Java and Maven on their systems to use it. And finding  
>> developers
>> who know Maven, Java and .NET is not the easiest thing, so I'll be  
>> putting
>> in some time into Byldan (http://codeplex.com/byldan), a .NET  
>> version of
>> Maven.  I'm looking to port over the new 3.0 project builder code,  
>> so we can
>> start bringing the Byldan project model inline with Maven's pom. We  
>> can
>> build the plugins once in .NET and then execute them using either  
>> Byldan or
>> NMaven. The unreleased version 0.14 has this .NET plugin support,  
>> but that
>> code needs to be rewritten and/or cleaned up. We will need  
>> developers with
>> experience in app loading and app domains.
>>
>> Another area I would like to focus on is the Visual Studio support.  
>> Eugene
>> has done a lot of work with the m2eclipse plugin, using Lucene  
>> indexing of
>> the the POMs for artifact searches, so I'm looking to create similar
>> functionality using Lucene.NET.
>>
>> The final areas of focus are ones that we have been trying to solve  
>> from day
>> one: properly handling versionless artifact file names and doing  
>> toolchain
>> support, at both the client and server level. These problems are  
>> enormously
>> difficult to do against the web based repositories, so I will be  
>> looking to
>> integrate NMaven/Byldan with the Nexus Repo Manager Rest APIs, just  
>> pegging
>> the technology so we can get things moving more quickly. This  
>> should also
>> make things like PDB attached artifacts easier to handle.
>>
>> I'll be posting more transition information over the coming week.  
>> Feel free
>> to shoot back with any questions or concerns.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Shane
>
> --
> Brett Porter
> brett@...
> http://blogs.exist.com/bporter/
>