[MNG-3511] Review fix for MNG-2166

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Minor
• Resolution: Fixed
• Affects Version/s: 2.0.8
• Fix Version/s: 2.0.10, 2.1.0-M1
• Component/s: Command Line
• Flags: Patch
• Assignee: John Dennis Casey
• Reporter: Benjamin Bentmann
• Created: 09/Apr/08 13:16
• Updated: 05/Apr/15 14:54
• Resolved: 08/Jul/08 13:08

Description

As requested by Brett in MNG-3276, here a new issue. My relevant comment over at the other issue:

I still consider the output from Maven quite unhelpful in this case. Please consider that Maven is just a tool/utility for developers and hence not everybody out there will spend time to get through the documentation. Some peoply simply want to "use" Maven, not understand how it works.

The Ant scripts that I am trying to replace in our organization all provided some help about the current project and the available targets using the echo task when the default target was executed. This allowed newbies to quickly figure out how to perform build steps without ever reading the Ant manual. Surely, once you know Maven's lifecycle you never need such help targets but especially old Ant geeks need some easy way of migrating into Maven land.

The attached patch should provide the following console output:

[INFO] Scanning for projects...
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[ERROR] BUILD FAILURE
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO]

You must specify at least one goal or lifecycle phase to perform build steps.
The following list illustrates some commonly used build commands:

  mvn clean
    Deletes any build output (e.g. class files or JARs).
  mvn test
    Runs the unit tests for the project.
  mvn install
    Copies the project artifacts into your local repository.
  mvn deploy
    Copies the project artifacts into the remote repository.
  mvn site
    Creates project documentation (e.g. reports or Javadoc).

Please see
http://maven.apache.org/guides/introduction/introduction-to-the-lifecycle.html
for a complete description of available lifecycle phases.

Use "mvn -?" to show general usage information about Maven's command line.

[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] For more information, run Maven with the -e switch
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Total time: 1 second
[INFO] Finished at: Mon Oct 22 20:48:42 EDT 2007
[INFO] Final Memory: 1M/4M
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------

This output is intended to show further comon use-cases than just "install". Besides, the user is pointed to a concrete URL with helpful information for his actual need (personally, I consider pointing people at home pages as helpful as telling to use Google... information should be found, not searched)

Issue Links

• is related to: MNG-2166 Provide the help listing as default when no arguments are provided