Sylvain Wallez pisze:

I've been working with Maven (mainly when working with Cocoon) for more than
year and I can agree on main point of Maven critics that Maven is flawed. My personal opinion is that basic ideas behind Maven are correct but
implementation is totally broken. Or at least it was at the beginning because now, thanks to many eye
balls, it seems to improve from release to release.

I was wondering many times if there is any other choice for us. Given the amount
energy we've put into mavenization process any switch is impossible so such discussion could be
only theoretical. Still I would enjoy reading about some alternatives because this could put my
(and probably others) thinking into right direction thus, eventually improving our existing
infrastructure.

There is one statement that I don't agree: Maven is not just a build system. If
it was only a build system I would be the first one to propose dropping Maven completely because of
its implementation. For me, Maven is the whole ecosystem which consists of good practices when it
comes to your project's structure, Maven repository (the killer feature IMHO) and integration
with so many systems acting around basic build process.

What I would prefer is to take a lesson from our past experience but still focus
on the future. I strongly believe that we have reached this stage when people can happily focus
on developing Cocoon and not on developing Cocoon's infrastructure thus I would like to invite all
old-timers to join our forces and provide the best of Cocoon experience ever. I strongly believe we
have all foundations needed for that now.

Most of these questions come from the confusion about splitting up Cocoon into
smaller pieces. And even more questions come from the fact that people starting with 2.2 are still
trying to build it themselves because that was done in 2.1. If you use released versions then you
will have no problem with dependencies, missing artifacts, etc. When you checkout trunk and try to build it then I would say that it should be
no surprise that sometimes you get into troubles, right?

I would really like to know what kind of chronic disease you see Sylvain. I
don't deny there might be one so if you would have shared your observations with rest community we
could start to think about improving it in the future.

For me it would be interesting to see if one of "retired old-timers" could try
to spend some time on playing with trunk just to gather some experience. Certainly, such "external"
audit by some of the most honored members of this community would be a blessing experience only if it
would allow to bring closer our stances.