RedstoneChips maven repository

[Mordenkainen]

It might be nice if there was a maven repo for RC.

A new circuit library developer now has to pull down etCommons, RedstoneChips, Bukkit, CraftBukkit, etc before they can begin development, because they have to get all of the artifacts in their local repository.

Some of these are already in the POM, but some like the etCommons and RC itself can not easily be added because they have no maven repo, so the user has to download the .jar files and install them manually, or has to download the source and "package install" them.

There is also a potential issue if the source in GitHub has been updated, but has not yet been released. The user will be developing against the new source, but may need to build the plugin for the old source. I ran into this problem because of the changes to wireless channels a while back, I needed to develop against the old API, but the source I was developing against was the new API.

I suggest that a maven repo be put up on GitHub to hold artifacts so that maven can automatically download the dependencies at the version desired.

Also, perhaps tags should be put in place on releases so that if the developer needs to pull the source for a particular release, they can do so using the tag.

My understanding is that this should be as simple as doing a "package Install" and then taking the pom, artifact, and maven metadata files from your local maven repo and checking them into the github pages.

[eisental]

I agree. I'm just clueless about maven repos. If what you're saying is correct, the only problem I see would be that this will require keeping track of versions in the RC pom.xml file. Currently all versions are called RedstoneChips-beta to simplify making new releases so I'll need to change the procedure a bit.

As for tagging, it should be very easy. I'll do it for 0.95.