Request for stable, automated build process

[Ian Darwin]

Hugo Mills wrote:
> On Sat, May 03, 2008 at 08:21:27PM -0400, Lally Singh wrote:
>> Just out of curiosity, would maven be completely out of the question?

Yes.

>    Please, for the love of all that's holy, no.
> 
>    I work with maven in my job. It's the most horrible misbegotten
> misdesigned piece of hideousness I've ever had the misfortune to work
> with. I'm not alone in that opinion, either -- pretty much everyone I
> know who's used it has the same opinion.

While I might not have worded it quite that way, I have considered 
writing a paper with the title "Maven Considered Harmful". But it would 
be too short to publish as a paper... The main problem is, as Hugo 
mentioned, dependencies can change without notice and break things on 
you.  You want repeatable builds? Write a build system that saves the 
complete name and MD5 of every file, and checks every file that it 
downloads before using it, every time. The OpenBSD (Unix-like system) 
"ports" mechanism does this for all third-party software, and it 
therefore has repeatable builds. Maven does not.