I am working on a number of small projects with Eclipse, Spring, Java and Tomcat using Subversion for version control. I am looking to try to use Maven for the first time but one thing I see already that I don’t like is that if I start a project with maven it will download all the dependency into my .m2 folder and all the class path to the projects but we like to have all the dependency moved into WEB-INF/lib so we can check them into Subversion.
Can this be done with Maven? Should it be done this way?
Checking in binary packages into your source control isn’t really ideal, and goes against the grain with maven. A valid concern is what happens when those online repositories go down and the solution is to host your own repository using something like Artifactory. Some people don’t like that they have to maintain another system along side with the source control, but it’s worth it to get all the features that maven brings to the table.