10 Months From Maven 2.0.4 to 2.0.5. What’s Wrong With That Picture?

Posted on February 16th, 2007 in General, Software, Tech.

Maven 2.0.4: released April 11, 2006
Maven 2.0.5: released February 14, 2007.

I’m really glad Maven 2.0.5 is out, it fixes quite a number of important issues (along with some more more minor stuff and enhancements). But for a tool which should be one of the key enablers of an agile and frequent release process, something seems broken somewhere if it takes 10 months to put out a point release when there are enough issues of this magnitude.

Of course, Maven is mostly built by volunteers, with limited resources. Should it be held to a different (less than ideal) standard because of this? I don’t think so. There first of all seems to be a decent amount of developer activity, but even in the face of more work than time/people to do it, I would argue the project (like any software development activity) when working on bugs and requirements needs to triage the list of things that are worked on, and focus on a regular and more frequent release process. Anything else is ultimately damaging to people’s confidence in using Maven… It’s interesting that on the dev list, as far back as Nov. 2006 there was a thread asking for the release of 2.0.5, with mention of user frustration after no release in more than 5 months, with many serious issues fixed. Bad enough; how did that become 10 months?

 

4 responses

  1. Carlos Sanchez says:

    Added on February 22nd, 2007 at 5:03 pm

    i agree ;)

  2. Dude says:

    Added on May 15th, 2007 at 5:08 pm

    Maven developers are really anal about testing, so there were two days of planning, 3 days of development, 4 months of testing, 1 month of inputting bugs, 2 months of planning again (the original idea didn’t work well), the 1 month of development, 1 month of testing, 1 month of deciding which font to use for the next release headline.

    So that should explain it

  3. Klettergriffe Set says:

    Added on May 23rd, 2007 at 6:10 pm

    I agree with you.

    Peter :-)

  4. Sandesh Sadhale says:

    Added on June 19th, 2007 at 1:41 pm

    Well I agree too! It just clearly indicates that Maven is out of the window for most of the people already and it will go out of the door as fast as it became a tool people started using. Lets just wake up guys and be more practical. ANT is more than enough to do our builds and its just sweet and works. It does only what I want it to do and no other crap (such as downloading jars etc.). Maven suck*d from day 1 and it continues to do so even today. May God Bless Maven users and supporters (while we are sleeping after finishing our builds using ANT :-) )

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