[Webtest] A pom for WebTest

[Denis N. Antonioli]

Dears

there have been numerous requests in the past for releases
  of webtest on ibiblio. The main obstacle is that ibiblio requires
a pom, a maven project, along with the webtest.jar.

Maven 2 provides a set of ant tasks to work with a pom from
within ant, so I've fetched them this week and tried to adapt
our build process, to see whether a pom is reasonable for us.

What I now have is:
1) removed som jar from the directory lib/.
	It should be possible to keep in cvs only lib/runtime/
	and maybe the dependencies that are not in ibiblio,
	such as Marc's daily build from htmlunit :-)
2) a new target fetchDependencies.
	The new target fetches the dependencies described in
	the pom to ~/.m2, the standard maven 2 cache of the
	repositories.
	The target also computes the necessary classpath for
	compilation, ...

I think this is a promising development for webtest, but I'd
like to get your opinion, because I also see some negative
impacts:

1) lib/ doesn't contain the dependencies anymore, which
	are now 'somewhere' in ~/.m2.
	-> How to setup our ide then?
2) the lib/ that is put together for distribution will most probably
	be flat. The information that we encode now in the directory
	structure of lib (e.g. plugin/ vs optional/,...) woud have to be
	reconstructed from the pom(s), or ignored.
3) I don't see yet how to reproduce the concept of plugin.
	Should we keep it? Should there be a pom for each plugin?


So, what do you think?
Is it a path worth taking?
Should we move (most of) our dependencies from our lib/ to the pom?

Best
	dna

-- 
Binaries may die but source code lives forever.
   -- The Halloween Document