Recently a proposal came up on the Apache infrastructure list (Sorry, AFAIK, the list isn't archived, thus no pointers from here.) to install Nexus Professional on one of the Apache servers as a repository server. The idea was, in particular, to use Nexus' staging facilities for pushing Apache software releases.
The proposal was posted by Brian Fox, with support by Jason van Zyl. As you can see from my links, both are employed by Sonatype, the company producing Nexus. (Jason is founder and CTO). Obviously, the ASF won't be a bad reference for them. The proposal seems to be rapidly acceptet, almost without objection. (There was some discussion, but mostly about technical details or Maven at all.) As a result, you can view the installed Nexus live today, which is what I did.
In all honesty, I'm going to like it. Having had my share of release management and the related trouble, this is going to help: Pushing some 30 or 40 files to people.apache.org (the number seems big, but you have to consider various signatures, like .md5 and/or .sha1 files as well as GPG signatures, aka .asc files) via SSH to a common place and later distributing it manually to various places is error-prone. But that is like it is: Placement in the common place (typically a users public_html directory) allows the review and vote by fellow developers. Once the release is accepted, the files are being moved to the final target locations. Nexus can help with that and the UI is, of course, very neat.
But that is not the reason for todays entry. What strikes me as rather odd is the fact, how easy a commercial product can make its way into the Apache server park. This is not the first such product: Apache is hosting a Jira server for issue tracking as well as a Confluence Wiki. I observed the discussions when these have been introduced. Jira is basically the successor to the Apache Bugzilla (at least more and more Apache projects leave Bugzilla in favour of Jira) just as well as Confluence is quickly replacing the Apache MoinMoin wiki. In both cases the question was raised, whether an open source product wouldn't be preferrable. Ideally, whether there couldn't be an Apache project to use: "Eat your own dog food" has some tradition within the ASF. The Apache web servers are frequently relatively stable development versions. In both cases there have been no such projects, and the open source alternatives had their share of problems. So I understood the decision.
Which is what I don't do in the case of Nexus as an Apache repository server. There is Archiva, an Apache project, which could do the job. Ok, it doesn't have the bells and whistles, but it does its job. I can tell, because I am using it in my daily work. It is a mature project in active development, obviously also sponsored by commercial companies. Ok, it can't support staging right now, but that wouldn't be overly difficult (Brett Porter has offered to add it, should the ASF require) and within a reasonable time frame. Should be enough at least to consider it as decent dog food.
Alas, noone seemed to be interested in the Nexus discussion. So its Nexus. I can live with it. Understanding is a different matter.
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I think you're forgetting one important point in that I founded the project and between Brian and myself we've done every major release in the last two years. I think Nexus is about as close to our own dog food as you can get!
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