In a previous post entitled m2e Roadmap, Jason discussed Sonatype’s commitment to quality and testing for m2eclipse. As a follow-up, I did a quick interview with Rich Seddon and asked him some questions about Sonatype’s approach to testing for Eclipse plugins. The interview is approximately five minutes long and in this interview, you’ll here Rich give some detailed descriptions of the tools he uses to test the m2eclipse plugin.
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Roberto Galoppini just published a brief interview with Mark de Visser this morning which covers Sonatype’s open documentation efforts. As someone who has been involved with Sonatype’s open book efforts along with Jason, Brian, John, Jason, Bruce, and our other contributing authors it is interesting to see the traffic and interest that is generated by something as simple as free documentation. I’ve long been a big believer that books about open source software should be as free as the software itself, and I’m also convinced that solid documentation is a necessary foundation for a vibrant open-source community. Without a good “free” book, it is nearly impossible for an open source project to grow a community. Continue reading
After several months and countless release candidates, the 2.0.10 release is finally official.
You may recall some release candidates early last fall from 2.0.10 — those eventually became 2.1.0M1 as several new features were introduced that had a potential to destabilize 2.0.x users. The features were pulled out and the bug fixes kept behind, producing the official 2.0.10 release. This RC process started last year with 2.0.9 should produce another solid release.
Our attention will now turn back to finalizing the 2.1.0 release. The M1 release turned out to be very stable, but unfortunately since it was called a milestone release, many users didn’t (or weren’t allowed) to use it. Because of this, we have pushed out the features originally planned for future 2.1.0 milestones into the 2.2 release so we can focus on making 2.1.0 final.
Hopefully this will mean that 2.0.10 is the last release of the 2.0.x line, but the possibility remains of a release to fix any serious regressions that weren’t uncovered with all the release candidates.
The 3.0 alphas are also coming along, with alpha-3 due out any time now. With active releases coming out from three branches (2.0.x, 2.1.x, 3.0.x), you can pick your flavor: boring but stable, fresh yet familiar, or cool yet mysterious.
See the release notes for all the information and links to download the new release.
As a part of or continued work to produce solid documentation for Maven, we’ve decided to spin off the m2eclipse chapter from Maven: The Definitive Guide in a new book: Developing with Eclipse and Maven. As we prepare to expand all three of our current books, we decided that smaller, more focused titles are going to be a better platform for future documentation efforts. The great thing about an online book is that it is flexible enough to evolve over time. It my opinion that, even though books are moving toward a digital-only experience, books that grow larger a few hundred pages don’t scale well. For starters, they are difficult to print and navigate, but I also think that a 100 chapter behemoth of a book lacks focus. Even as PDFs, I like my books to be between 100-300 pages.
Book “bifurcation” is not something that a traditional publisher knows how to handle, books are assigned ISBN numbers and it isn’t common for a book to replicate itself in such a manner only months after printing. With digital, online books, it’s easy – split the source, create another project.
This isn’t an announcement of new content, just an announcement that the structure changed a bit. You can read Developing with Eclipse and Maven online, or you can download a PDF. Expect this book to change very rapidly over the next few weeks.
Yesterday I had a chance to release Mercury through the newly configured Nexus at https://repository.apache.org
Man – what a difference does a decent repository manager make!! All previous releases I had to struggle with different protocols, settings, signature generation. SCP suddenly stops working and deploy plugin starts asking for the password, signatures disappear. Simple thing, but I had to re-roll several times before cooking it just right (and still got it wrong).
The new process is a dream: it simply works. No hassles, no pains, just follow the document and everything just happens. No more excitement – will it work or not, no agitation, kind of boring.
And promotion is one mouse click! I cannot even compare that to staging plugin … I lack the words.
I believe this is the highest praise for a software development tool – it simply, transparently – works!
