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| The Maven Community |
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| Eric Redmond |
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| 17 October 2006 |
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| The Maven Community |
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| Maven, like any other opensource project, relies heavily on the efforts of the entire user community |
| to be ever vigilent for improvements, logging of defects, communicating use-cases, generating |
| documentation, and being wary of other users in need. This is a quick guide outlining what |
| members of the Maven community may do to make the system work better for everyone. |
| |
| * Helping With Maven |
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| There is already a comprehensive {{{guides/development/guide-helping.html}Guide to Helping With Maven}}. |
| That guide focuses upon beginning as a supporter, with information on how to help the coding effort. |
| |
| ** Commit Questions or Answers to the Maven User FAQ |
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| Documentation is currently a very high priority for the Maven community. Please help out where ever you can, |
| specifically in the work-in-progress {{{http://docs.codehaus.org/display/MAVENUSER/FAQs}FAQ Wiki}}. |
| |
| ** Help Log Defects in JIRA |
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| Just as any other healthy project requires a quick turn-around on defects, and a transparent |
| method of users to have their wishes heard, so too does Maven need your help. |
| |
| * {{{http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/MNG}Maven Defects, Improvements and Tasks}} |
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| * {{{http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/MPA}Maven Project Administration}} |
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| [] |
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| ** Developers |
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| For Maven developers, commiters, PMC: there is a {{{developers/index.html}Developers Guide}}. |
| |
| * Being a Good Maven Citizen |
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| The concept of a public repository built into the core architecture of Maven makes it |
| necessarily community-centric. There are a few simple things that Maven users may |
| do to help keep that community thriving. |
| |
| ** Be a Kind Public Repository User |
| |
| The best thing that a user can do is to set up their own remote repository mirror containing the |
| projects needed. There are several tools to make this simpler, such as |
| {{{http://proximity.abstracthorizon.org/}Proximity}} or {{{http://maven.apache.org/archiva/}Archiva}}. This |
| reduces strain on the Maven central repository, and allows new users to get acquainted with Maven |
| easier and quicker. This is especially important for power-users and corporations. The incentive |
| behind this is, controlling your own servers can give you desired level of security and |
| more control over uptime, resulting in a better experience for your users. With that said, keep the |
| following sentiment in mind: |
| |
| <DO NOT wget THE ENTIRE REPOSITORY!> |
| |
| Please take only the jars you need. We understand this is may entail more work, |
| but grabbing all 9+ Gigs of binaries really kills our servers. |
| |
| ** Host a Mirror |
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| As an extention to the previous statement, if you have access to a large data repository with |
| lots of bandwidth, please consider becomming a mirror for the Maven central repository. |
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| As you can imagine, thousands of users downloading can put quite a strain on one server. |
| If you wish to be a mirror, please make an announcement on the {{{mailto:users@maven.apache.org}Maven User List}}. |
| |
| ** Host a Public Repository |
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| If you have any projects that you wish others to use, host them on your own public repository. That |
| way, your users can simply add your repository to their own project repo list, and viola! Maven |
| can keep you and your users in synch, growing your user-base due simply to its new-found ease of use. |
| |
| * User Gathering Spots |
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| These are a few of the watering holes around which Maven users tend to gather. |
| |
| ** Mailing Lists |
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| The {{{mail-lists.html}Maven Mailing Lists}}. Specifically, the {{{mailto:users@maven.apache.org}Maven User List}}. |
| |
| ** IRC |
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| Log into the {{{http://irc.codehaus.org/}#maven IRC channel}} at {{{http://codehaus.org/}Codehaus}}. |
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