Debian and Maven, a crash of culture

Tim O’Brien posted his frustration about the state of Java packaging in Debian. While I’m not affiliated with Debian nor Ubuntu, I wanted to post something in defense. I completely understand where Tim is coming from. To the eyes of Java developers, the Java packaging in Debian looks completely Sisyphean. We got all the binaries…

Come join us on “Selenium, Jenkins, Robots, Oh My!” tomorrow

I’ll be speaking tomorrow at San Francisco Selenium Meetup about Jenkins & Selenium — mainly recent improvements in the Selenium plugin, as well as several other new plugins relevant in the combination of Jenkins and Selenium, complete with a demo. I’ve got a couple of pet-peeves against the Selenium project, so I’m going to pitch…

Attaching files to JUnit tests

Despite the fact that it is the de-facto standard of test reports in any programming languages (perhaps except .NET), JUnit test report format has a number of problems. One is that the format isn’t explicitly defined (and I’ll discuss this in a separate post), but another problem, which I’m going to dedicate this post for,…

POTD: Package renamed ASM

Today’s project of the day is a package renamed ASM library. I previously wrote about a problem in otherwise quite useful ObjectWeb ASM library. Namely, it breaks backward compatibility in such a way that badly breaks apps/libraries that use them. In that post, I wrote about two proposals to fix the pain point. One is…

POTD: checking package name for Windows reserved words

Today’s project of the day is a little tool that checks problems in your package names that can bite you on Windows. For backward compatibility with MS-DOS (which had ended its life more than 15 years ago!), Windows doesn’t allow you to create files/directories of certain names, such as “AUX” or “PRN” (see Microsoft Knowledge…