Section 1.17. Telling Maven About Your Team

1.17. Telling Maven About Your Team

Maven is a great collaboration tool which you can use to generate developer activity reports, as well as lists of project contributors and mailing lists.

1.17.1. How do I do that?

Most projects have a mailing list which is used to discuss architecture and implementation. And, from one perspective, projects such as Tomcat, Maven, and Ant are nothing more than a community of developers who share a subscription to the same mailing list. Mailing lists are not just for open source projects; many organizations are starting to use the same collaborative model used in open, public development. Because mailing lists are a pivotal part of collaboration, Maven provides a way for you to specify project mailing lists in project.xml. The following excerpt from project.xml adds a mailingLists element:

<mailingLists>   <mailingList>     <name>Maven User List</name>     <subscribe>[e-mail]</subscribe>     <unsubscribe>[e-mail]</unsubscribe>     <archive>http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=turbine-maven-user</archive>   </mailingList>   <mailingList>     <name>Maven Developer List</name>     <subscribe>[e-mail]</subscribe>     <unsubscribe>[e-mail]</unsubscribe>     <archive>http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=turbine-maven-dev</archive>   </mailingList> </mailingLists>

There are two types of team members in Maven projects: contributors and developers. While the definition may change for your project, contributors are usually members of an open source community who have contributed patches or documents, and developers are core members of a project. In the ASF, contributors and committers can both contribute to a project, but contributors have neither write access to the source repository nor a vote in major project decisions. The following excerpt from project.xml adds a contributor and a developer element to project.xml:

<developers>   <developer>     <name>Vincent Massol</name>     <id>vmassol</id>     <email>[e-mail]</email>     <organization>Apache Software Foundation</organization>     <roles>       <role>Author</role>       <role>Developer</role>     </roles>     <url>http://www.massol.net</url>     <timezone>+1</timezone>   </developer> </developers> <contributors>   <contributor>     <name>Tim OBrien</name>     <email>[e-mail]</email>     <organization>Apache Software Foundation</organization>     <roles>       <role>Author</role>       <role>Developer</role>     </roles>     <url>http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/1738</url>     <timezone>-6</timezone>   </contributor> </contributors>

1.17.2. What just happened?

You told Maven who is working on a project, and this will come in handy once we've generated a project web site. The developer and contributor information listed in this POM is used by the site generation plug-in, and a number of plug-ins that generate reports from source control. Speaking of source control...