Yesterday I submitted a pull request for some changes to Marc Schoenefeld's undx, a Dalvik .dex to JVM .class translator. The primary contribution is a pom.xml file used by Maven to build and package undx as an executable jar file; previously, no build instructions were provided.
The patch (my third to undx) has been merged into Zach Lanier's repository. In addition, Marc Schoenefeld has blessed this as the official undx repository, which is good news since the source has been unavailable for some time.
While Maven-based build systems appear to be common among Java projects, I did not find the experience of putting the pom.xml file together very pleasant. Even though I largely based my file off of another project's, I found the documentation dense and Maven's behavior unusual:
- This article on dependency management is pretty typical: huge blocks of XML which make skimming difficult.
- Maven needed to download 16 files for me to be able to run mvn clean, which deletes one directory.
- Maven names the built executable jar file undx-snapshot-jar-with-dependencies.jar. I think undx.jar would do fine.