[alook]

Agreed.

Transitively-resolved, platform-independent binaries are the big win coming from maven. Only once have I worked with a project where I required new system-level dependencies to compile & run a maven project; and I have never had a cross-platform issue when carrying projects across Mac & Linux.

To be fair, the import-compiled-transitive-dependencies-as-binaries pattern that Maven likes to employ is probably less easily adapted to natively compiled languages like C/C++ than it is to managed runtime languages (Java/Erlang) or scripting languages (Ruby/Python).

As much as it's a pain to work with "maven plugin spaghetti", it's at least deterministic and keeps things easy to figure out.

There are those dependencies that you learn to remain wary of (asm/cglib/antlr/jline/etc), but at the end of the day I'm happy to work in an ecosystem where I don't have to compile every single line of third-party code myself.

[bjt]

> To be fair, the import-compiled-transitive-dependencies-as-binaries pattern that Maven likes to employ is probably less easily adapted to natively compiled languages like C/C++ than it is to managed runtime languages (Java/Erlang) or scripting languages (Ruby/Python).

The "scripting languages" don't even have this as easy as it might seem. Half the dependencies in my Python projects these days have important bits written in C (e.g. psycopg2, gevent).