Oddness in 'Getting started guide'

[Martin Spamer]

The Getting started guide suggests the following dependency.

        <dependency>
            <groupId>com.technophobia.substeps</groupId>
            <artifactId>substeps-bom</artifactId>
            <version>1.1.0</version>
            <type>pom</type>
            <scope>test</scope>
        </dependency>

http://substeps.technophobia.com/getting-started.html#manual-maven

However it seems very strange to use BOM as a dependency.

Surely something like this would be more appropriate.

        <dependency>
            <groupId>com.technophobia.substeps</groupId>
            <artifactId>substeps-core</artifactId>
            <version>1.1.2</version>
        </dependency>

        <dependency>
            <groupId>com.technophobia.substeps</groupId>
            <artifactId>substeps-junit-runner</artifactId>
            <version>1.1.2</version>
        </dependency>

This would also avoid the hard coded dependency to 1.6.31 version of tools.jar.

[Ian Moore]

Hi Martin,

The BOM (Bill of Materials) was introduced to try and make it easier to manage the proliferation of substeps libraries, I believe this is the intended use case for BOMs.  It's not mandatory and of course you can specify the dependencies manually as you describe.

You're right about the hardcoded reference to tools.jar - that is quite annoying and a dependency we hope to remove soon.  It's a result of the generation of substeps glossary which is based on a Javadoc doclet, hence the dependency on tools.jar and as far as I'm aware there isn't a convenient way to achieve this (happy to hear suggestions though!).  When deadlines permit we're planning to remove this dependency altogether.

cheers
Ian