Andy Oliver writes.

Ted, I was unaware of your work as I bet was Nick and the Mavenites. However, while I speak for only myself, I bet Nick will agree as will Nicola Ken. We want to write as LITTLE of this as possible and combine as much. If you have something that mostly does it, lets work together because the only thing better than writing code is not having to! I can't really make hide or hair out of it ATM.

I've tried not to be too loud about my stuff at the ASF, because we already had JJAR and Maven, and I didn't want to talk about something that didn't exist. I talked to Kurt Schrader about the Maven stuff at ApacheCon, but got scared off by the size of the Maven code base. The downside of this is that I'm not really as up on Maven as I should be -- I'll be starting on that now. I think that its important to have dependencies both at the build system level and (somehow) at the jar level. That way systems can just use information in the jars to get what they need.

As one example of things that I'd like to enable (someday): If I go into Eclipse and check out a project from CVS, Eclipse should be able to figure out which jar files are needed for the project (aside from checking them into CVS), bring them down into the repository, and set the Eclipse build path. I spent a lot of time trying to track down all the jars for Maven when I tried to get it into Eclipse.

I'll try to fix up the docs and distribution so it's clearer what's going on.