maven central vs bintray

When I started developing continuous deployment pipeline for Mockito I was (naively) thinking that I could happily publish to Bintray and forget about Maven Central.

Not quite :)

The reason I started looking at Bintray in the first place was that I was hoping for simpler publication process. Specifically, I wanted to be able to publish a new version from a CI box I don't own (for example: Travis CI box). It's not quite that easy with Nexus OSS publication model. Maven Central fancies PGP signatures for the publications. To generate signatures, the gpg tooling is needed and the key ring with a private key. To perform the release from a box I don't own I need to provision the key and possibly gpg tooling, too. It's doable but kind of... hard. At least it seems hard enough to look at alternate solutions for publishing to Central (hey Bintray!).

There was one more gotcha with publishing directly to Nexus OSS. I would probably need to use Gradle's signing plugin for the pgp stuff. This plugin needs love - it does not yet work with Gradle's new beautiful publication DSL. The option of using old publication plugin was not appealing to me at all.

Setting up automated publication was a breeze with gradle-bintray-plugin. I became complacent. Everything was neatly set up: every git push triggered a completely automated release, an update to the release notes, a new real version published etc. A couple of days passed and the keywords "when", "Mockito", "Central" started dominating the community air. I was curious why users needed the jars in Central when they were available in Bintray's jCenter. There were a couple of good arguments and here's my favorite.

Happiness :) A lot of people still use Maven. I'm perfectly OK with this because they all will use Gradle eventually. It won't be long, Gradle is unstoppable. Maven projects use Central Repository by default so naturally, it's nicer if Mockito is available without any extra configuration. I'm happy that I don't have to maintain the documentation how to set up maven builds to consume Mockito dependency (yes, users were asking us about this). It's just nice when stuff works out of the box.

I really want to forget about Central but it turns out the world around me does not forget and pushes back. I continuously publish to Bintray and I enjoy very much the automation level it offers. I can sync to Central from Bintray (a step that I haven't yet automated). I don't have to mess around with PGP any more because I can hook up the key to "Mockito" organisation in Bintray UI and that's it. The whole Maven Central PGP requirement was questioned already by Bintray.

Thank you Bintray for making automation challenges simpler! Continuous deployment of Mockito wouldn't be there without you. I'd be still figuring out how to PGP from Travis CI and biting my nails with Gradle's old publication model (the new model is such a beauty!). In meantime Mockito users would wait another 2 years for the next release. Thank you Central for serving the jars to all Maven users (btw. jCenter can do this, too ;).

Next week I'm at JDD Conference in Krakow talking about continuous delivery. After that, I'm keen on getting out a nice blog post on how to cut down 2-year release cadence to 2 hours.