John Gregory wrote:I know that you can configure where goes to pull files for inclusion in an application,
repo1 being the main one. But when I look at the settings.xml file that comes with
maven, there's really not much to it.
That's by design. Maven builds are supposed to be repeatable, and the more you customize your system and your environment, the more likely there will be non-repeatable aspects in it. For the open-source Maven projects,
you should (usually) be able to build them without any settings.xml file at all, although for performance, proxying, and other reasons you might find it useful to tweak some things.
Although this seems - and is - restrictive, I'm very much in favor of it. I've been burned too many times by being handed projects that could only be built using a specfic version of a specific brand of
IDE with specific desktop settings. Which is to say an exact clone of the PC that the original developer used. Aside from the sheer amount of work that this generally entails, not infrequently it ends up conflicting with my own or other author's build environments.
Which is why I have a rule that every project I do be buildable via command-line without recourse to an IDE. IDE's are a major help. but when the chips are down, I want something that won't let me down.