Today, a colleague of me tried to integrate JMatter into our Maven based buildsystem (which drives the Eclipse side too) for experimental purposes. As you will divine, this didn't went well and he finally ended with a ordinary, poor man's lib directory, which holds all the needed jars for JMatter of a size of almost 30 MB.

Stop! Why is it so hard to integrate foreign packages into Maven? I believe it is because Maven tries to address to many aspects of different domains. It tries to be a build system, a package management system, a dependency resolver and a package repository at the same time ... and it fails miserable.

On the other hand, other buildsystems like e.g. Ant ignore their dependencies completely. They simply assume those jars and classes are present somewhere somehow.

In my search for alternatives for Ant and Maven, Raven crossed my path. Here is a somewhat lenghty comment to Matthieu Riou's blog post Builds And Transitive Dependencies.

Transitive dependencies are an essential requirement dictated by the nature of software development. Each buildsystem which claims to be a real one (including package management), has to support transitive dependencies.

The question is, at what level this support goes and how clever these dependencies are handled. Working with Maven, I can say that dependency handling cannot going worse. Comming from the Linux distribution Gentoo I'm used to a package management system (portage) which is more clever than all tools I've found for the whole Java and scripting language world in terms of (transitive) dependency management.