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+1 for the guy sitting at the window story. Maven killed the ANTLR parser generator for me. I wanted to try making a compiler and ANTLR looked like the bee's

+1 for the guy sitting at the window story. Maven killed the ANTLR parser generator for me. I wanted to try making a compiler and ANTLR looked like the bee's knees. So I download it, try to build it using the official instructions, and package downloads start zooming across my screen. "What in the nine green hells of Zorgon is this?!," I think to myself. Then Maven blew up. "Oh, crap," I think. Then I look at the config file to see how to fix it. XML. "Oh, CRAP!" I think. I try to do a clean rebuild. Maybe a stray file got into version control, maybe an HTTP server horked during the downloads, that sort of thing. Maven could no longer read its own repository. "!@#$!@$ !@#%% !@#@$@!! !@#@#@ $#!$$!@," I say out load. And delete ANTLR. Life's too short to be stepping through a debugger for the build tool for your build tool for you build tool.

brown9-2 17y ago
Why don't you just download the binaries from the ANTLR site? http://www.antlr.org/download/antlr-3.2.jar http://www.antlr.org/download/antlr-3.2.jar for "Complete ANTLR 3.2 jar; all tools, runtime, etc..." http://www.antlr.org/download.html http://www.antlr.org/download.html
- donw 17y ago
  Perhaps he wanted to build from source, for whatever reason? Certainly a 'build tool' should make this, well, easy.
  - brown9-2 17y ago
    Yeah it should. And the project should make sure it's easy to build from source as well. I just tried to download Antlr source from the site and build it and I get errors about how they've configured a plugin which needs to connect to their SCM but they haven't configured their part. I can see that Maven has a sharp learning curve, and that it can be frustrating when you want to get just one task done - I think it shines when you are working in an environment with many projects with inter-dependencies between them - but some blame should be pointed here at the Antlr project authors, who haven't made sure that you could cleanly build the source on their site.
    - Daniel_Newby 17y ago
      I wanted to give the Python target better support for characters outside the Unicode Basic Multilingual Plane. I.e., I was smoking crack. "I think it shines when you are working in an environment with many projects with inter-dependencies between them" I haven't seriously used Maven, obviously, but its basic design violates the separation of concerns principle. A combination of projects is simply a higher-level project, whose targets can perfectly well be created by a Makefile that downloads them. Maven is a shining example of what happens to people who don't understand recursion.

brown9-2 17y ago

Why don't you just download the binaries from the ANTLR site? http://www.antlr.org/download/antlr-3.2.jar http://www.antlr.org/download/antlr-3.2.jar for "Complete ANTLR 3.2 jar; all tools, runtime, etc..." http://www.antlr.org/download.html http://www.antlr.org/download.html

donw 17y ago
Perhaps he wanted to build from source, for whatever reason? Certainly a 'build tool' should make this, well, easy.
- brown9-2 17y ago
  Yeah it should. And the project should make sure it's easy to build from source as well. I just tried to download Antlr source from the site and build it and I get errors about how they've configured a plugin which needs to connect to their SCM but they haven't configured their part. I can see that Maven has a sharp learning curve, and that it can be frustrating when you want to get just one task done - I think it shines when you are working in an environment with many projects with inter-dependencies between them - but some blame should be pointed here at the Antlr project authors, who haven't made sure that you could cleanly build the source on their site.
  - Daniel_Newby 17y ago
    I wanted to give the Python target better support for characters outside the Unicode Basic Multilingual Plane. I.e., I was smoking crack. "I think it shines when you are working in an environment with many projects with inter-dependencies between them" I haven't seriously used Maven, obviously, but its basic design violates the separation of concerns principle. A combination of projects is simply a higher-level project, whose targets can perfectly well be created by a Makefile that downloads them. Maven is a shining example of what happens to people who don't understand recursion.