the corner office : tech blog

Man. Untold pain with Maven 3.0.4 and the maven release plugin with git. I haven't touched this stuff in over a year, using 2.something, and perhaps it didn't work properly then, either.

The biggest headache is that I want clean release versions, but I don't want to hard-code servers and paths into my poms. If I ever push the code to a public repo it's just noise, and my home set-up changes often enough, besides.

So, to get mvn release:prepare working with the local git repo, I did the following:

In the pom, I added:

<scm>
    <connection>scm:git:file://.</connection>
</scm>

and in the plugins section:

<plugin>
    <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
    <artifactId>maven-release-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>2.3.2</version>
    <configuration>
        <pushChanges>false</pushChanges>
        <localCheckout>true</localCheckout>
    </configuration>
</plugin>

Then because I don't have a distributionManagement element, mvn release:perform falls over. I could fiddle with the deploy goals, but I do have a 'private' (not local) repo where I keep my release builds. The trick is getting the altDeploymentRepository argument passed to the forked maven process:

mvn -B release:perform -Darguments="-DaltDeploymentRepository=id::default::file:///path/to/my/repo/"

(the -B hides the progress output when downloading)

Git relative pathing broken with release plugin (mvn release:perform borked with git and cygwin)

Tinkering on a few been-on-the-TODO-list-for-years things on the blog app, led me to the Tomcat JDBC Connection Pool and BoneCP. I don't need crazy performance, I just want to move away from JNDI and find something easier to set up in code than DBCP. So I'm going to try the Tomcat pool, and see how it goes.

• TechCrunch: So, That’s It For Thunderbird (official). Not really, since they're still maintaining and doing security patches. Pity but makes sense. Usual outcry: how dare you stop spending effort on a product I use but have never paid for or contributed code to. Pfeh.

Studies are over, and for the first time in 3 years I (notionally) have free time again. Programming in Scala 2nd Edition arrived in the post a couple of days ago. Lessee how this goes...

youtube-dl rocks.

CAST: computer aided statistics training

I've already got two jdk's installed, what more do I need to get maven running on the fresh new LXDE install?:

mavis ~ # aptitude install maven2
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  ant{a} ant-optional{a} antlr{a} bsh{a} bsh-gcj{a} ca-certificates-java{a} fop{a} gcj-4.6-base{a} ...
*snip eleventy billion other packages*
... maven2 openjdk-6-jre{a} openjdk-6-jre-headless{a} openjdk-6-jre-lib{a} rhino{a} tzdata-java{a} velocity{a} 
0 packages upgraded, 113 newly installed, 0 to remove and 2 not upgraded.
Need to get 95.6 MB of archives. After unpacking 218 MB will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n/?] n
Abort.
mavis ~ # 

Think I'll just download my own copy and add it to my PATH, thanks.

So, downstairs, the new gaming-spec Dell, which with Windows 7 is more sluggish than the old Acer, running XP, now consigned to the spare room. And for development work, I'm pretty much sticking with the Acer. Now that I'm the only one using it, I'm slowly building up the energy to re-install Linux on the spare partition (extra-slowly now that my right hand is in a cast). The existing Ubuntu installation is going - thanks Mr Shuttleworth for many years of a great OS, but I'm not sure if I care for where you're taking things.

Enter Linux Mint, and in particular, the LXDE edition. Still Ubuntu based which is nice, but lighter and a traditional feel. I'm still using a years-old version of VMware which powers the wee server exposing the Acer's ext3 partition (via samba), database and source code repos, but decided to give Mint a test drive using VirtualBox. VirtualBox has come a long way since I last tried it, and it's all working so well and seamlessly that I'm wondering whether I should just stay with XP and do all my Linuxey stuff virtually. Very tempting.

I'm impressed with two excellent pieces of software.

Update: two blue screens later, which I'd suspect is down to raw partition access, I'm thinking VMware isn't totally out of the running.

Tim Bray: Network App Macroeconomics

This sort of sucks. There was a time when every client was a browser running on a PC, and most PCs were in the big picture like most other PCs, and that’s how the world was. But now, we’re in a position where client memory is very nearly as scarce and precious as server memory. Which changes lots of things.

For now, is all I will add.