this sounds very much as if some sort of deployment is needed. I never thought about a central repository on a far away server here of course.

This reads a little as if there is no documentation/guide of how to write a plugin, deploy it to the local repository and then use it from your build.

Well, that is not good enough for me anyway. It sounds like a two phase operation, where I have to do both phases. That is something lacking automatisation if it is like that.

this answers the first question, but not the second.. thinking about the deployment to a local repository and the jar that is required for it I guess it is not possible, or at last not easy.

You are making a small mistake here. Groovy is not intended to replace Java, it is part of the toolbox. Groovy is especially designed to work well together with Java. Now using anything to script m2 is quite different, because m2 is not especially designed to be scripted. I even think that doing so would be against the maven philosophy of not having build logic in the build configuration file.Of course you can write plugins in Groovy and use them like you use java plugins, but that misses the point, because this talk is more or less about having a build configuration or a build program.

But the books won't answer the tricky questions. Professional support is not always for open source developers.

Generating basic configuration is nice and good, but that won't help with the tricky parts either. Ant is more easy, because it is less complex. m2 has an additional layer, an additional machine running inside, hidden from the normal eye, that you have to understand as well when it comes to the bad parts.

Of course there is always someone able to answer the tricky question. But for example in case of ant there is so much documentation on the net, even about unusual problems, that it is easy to find solutions in most cases. Ant has been there for many years and m2 will need a long time before it can be on par with that.

I am curious about the cases Hans wants to show...

I am sure that for someone who knows the internals of m2 all things are easy to do. I mean just take for example me and some strange language extension to Groovy. I can in most cases easily add that somehow. If it is a clean way or if it even should be done at all is a different question. But I can do. Now for the normal user this is more or less impossible, since he does not know the internals of Groovy and the can be complex. in ant I have internals too... sometimes many layers of indirection making me crazy if I need to find something. But after all it is not a so complicated thing and you get somehow through it. I never wrote any plugins for m2 or tried to fix bugs...

or get around them somehow. But from the look at the codebase of m2 I cannot say I like it very much. Again, my personal opinion, that thing that does not have to be based on facts ;) More or less my problem in m2 was always that I not even have an idea of where to start

hehe, yes, I remember..the project.xml contained nearly nothing and the maven.xml was a monster. In the end the project.xml did not do much and the file you always change is the maven.xml. Also if ant is configuration too and most of the action you would do in ant happens in the maven.xml, then why is the maven.xml no configuration?

depends. if you don't need to touch the xml, then the xml is fine with me. I just ignore it and be done with it. If I need to change the XML, then I hope that is not too big, does not use name spaces and that I don't have to introduce new ones.In the end XML is ok, if the file is small. Ever seen the XML of a complex svg graphic... Of course you can understand that somehow... you just waste so much time and you are better of with a GUI based tool instead of reading the plain text.

sure, but personal taste is higly influenced by things other people say and by perception as well as the things the management forces you to do. If your idol uses ant, then you may not consider a change to m2 even if you recognize it as better tool. I dislike XML very much, so I dislike tools where I have to write xml as well.

yes, but what are the needs of many... sometimes one is more important than many. Sometimes needs are not seen or ignored by "the many". Look at Groovy for example. There are many java programers having Java nearly as religion. Groovy gives them a nearly satanic look. And sometimes one of these simply tries Groovy and then sees that it is not bad at all and that he won't die from looking a bit more at it. Once you looked at other languages people start to learn principles Java does not have, they get a feeling of what could be and then they see that Java lacks things here and there. And depending on how much they like these lacking thins, they might even change their programming language and using Java might look as torture to them all of a sudden.