I have my share of complaints like everybody else about Apache Maven and one of them is that upon installation (or upgrading to a new plugin version) it starts downloading half of the available internet. Maven is constructed in a highly modular fashion, requiring lots of different, small, focused Java libraries. I'd like the distribution to contain those libraries, but I digress. Tonight I saw that not only Maven is structured this way. It is something *all* open source projects got.

For example, the much touted Ruby on Rails project with their disdain for everything Java would probably cringe at Maven (it uses XML after all). But installing Ruby on Rails and for example Radiant CMS with some plugins is a futile attempt in finding the right invocations of: script/*, rake, gem, port and other commandline tools you'll want to get familiar with. All these tools start downloading stuff from the internet from different repositories (SVN, ruby forge, etc).

Maven: you're not alone anymore in downloading the internet for your builds...