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  1. Jenkins
  2. JENKINS-502

GUI for Maven builds can be confusing

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    • Icon: Improvement Improvement
    • Resolution: Unresolved
    • Icon: Major Major
    • maven-plugin
    • None
    • Platform: All, OS: All

      I've been evaluating Hudson, and it looks great! There was just one area that
      left me quite bewildered until I worked out what was going on, so I thought I
      would propose some minor GUI changes that might make things a little clearer.

      First, I added a new job to build a simple single-module Maven 2 project. I then
      built the project, and had to play about with the goals that were being
      executed. I changed the goals, then found they didn't build as expected. I went
      back to the configuration, and it appeared to have lost my changes. And I got
      confused by the fact that sometimes when I went into the configuration, some of
      the options seemed to be missing.

      OK, I finally worked out that when you add a Maven project, it creates a
      top-level job to build the project as a whole, then a sub-entry to build each
      module. You can specify a different goal when executing the project as a whole
      and when executing an individual module, if I understand correctly.

      In hindsight this is reasonably obvious, but I hadn't noticed the different
      levels in the breadcrumb, and it did confuse me for a while. I would suggest the
      following the changes to the GUI:

      • For single module Maven projects, do not create sub-entries if there is only
        one module
      • If there are sub-entries for each module, clearly label them. For example, at
        the moment both would be labeled as "Project MyProject", instead of "Project
        MyProject" and "Module MyProject::MyProject" or something similar. You could
        take this further and clearly label each of the actions/configuration pages
        (e.g. "Project Configuration" vs. "Module Configuration".

      I hope you find these suggestions constructive..!

      Thanks, Alex.

            Unassigned Unassigned
            alexmcmanus alexmcmanus
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              Created:
              Updated: