Last week, Maven 2.0.5 was finally released. It was long in coming (over nine months since 2.0.4), but well worth the wait. It fixes a TON of bugs, many of which I’ve hit my own builds and have had to do a lot of hacks and workarounds to deal with. (Now I have to go through and remove some of the hacks) 🙂
Maven 2.0.5 is pretty exciting in itself, but all the other “behind the scenes” stuff that was developed to support/produce this release is fantastic work and doesn’t get the attention it deserves in the announcement. The work they did on the release process should benifit any enterprise level Maven user as well other open source projects using Maven.
I’m talking about things like:
maven-gpg-plugin – digitally signs the artifacts. Requirement for apache projects and others.
maven-remote-resources-plugin – allows injection of common resources (like licenses, disclaimers, etc…) into all the jars.
For apache projects, created the apache-jar-resource-bundle and apache-incubator-disclaimer-resource-bundle for those common artifacts.
Updating the release procedures to support “staging” of releases for inspection before being promoted to the final repository.
repositorytools-maven-plugin (at mojo/codehaus) for doing that promotion.
I know that I learned a LOT following all the discussions around the efforts that went into all of the above.
Anyway, a “really big thanks” to all the Maven developers for their hard work.