Bug#644260: Improving maven-repo-helper code

[Ludovic Claude]

Hello Thomas,

Those are good ideas, but they will take time and bring not much more in 
terms of functionality.
I agree that the code needs moderniwing, it was written for Java 1.4 as 
Maven 2.0 was also compiled for 1.4. The use of StAX parser made the 
code too procedural, and it evolved quickly in a big clob.

We could use DecentXML for example to patch the POM files, maybe that's 
worth investigating.
http://code.google.com/p/decentxml/

But in general I think that we should look into what Maven provides, and 
it looks like the new Aether libraries could help us to read those POM 
files. It would be great also to find a strategy to reuse the dependency 
resolution algorithm from Maven, as it's quite complex.

So instead of trying to improve the code incrementally, I would favor a 
radical new approach if that were possible. I need first to work on 
Maven 3 packaging and look more deeply which APIs could be reused there.

Another point is that maven-debian-helper and maven-repo-helper are 
deeply dependent, so changes on repo-helper will have to be carefully 
managed.

 > Actually I started diving into maven-repo-helper because it somehow 
deleted a
 > dependency from a project I want to package (jgit)...

Could you file a bug report for this case?

Thanks for your comments anyway, I will try to incorporate them in 
future devs.

Ludovic