On Dec 19, 2011, at 1:06 PM, jean-frederic clere wrote:

I did this work and suggested tomcat look at it several years ago, and don't
remember all the details, some other people have been maintaining it recently.
IIRC the maven projects generate pretty much the same jars as the ant build,
possibly plus one more to get around the circular dependencies among the jars.
So to generate a maven multimodule project to build the jars, 20 min to
configure the script that builds the project, then you have a mavenized tomcat
project checked in that builds pretty much the same jars as the ant build. I
don't really know what else the ant build generates.

I think the benefit might be more on the order of encouraging people who ask
"where did this jar come from-- I wanna fix something". For people familiar
with maven, there is IMO a much higher barrier to contributing to tomcat than a
well-structured maven project. (BTW I must add that I'm delighted that the
tomcat community seems much more receptive to outside input than it did several
years ago -- community unfriendliness seems to be totally missing now :-) ).