Hi all,

I'd like to propose that we move to Maven for the M1 release.

The benefits of Maven are many: vastly enhanced dependency tracking,
consistency with other Apache projects, simpler release management,
better test organisation, automatic doc generation, and plenty more.

Steve Vinoski has been working on a branch to complete the move to
Maven, but unfortunately it remains a moving target. There are still too
many changes occurring which cause him to go through a "merge back,
rebuild, re-test" cycle each time.

Therefore, to allow a migration to Maven to occur, we would have to hold
off on commits to the Java code for a small amount of time. I believe
that freezing for that short period of time and merging the Maven branch
would definitely be worth the effort.

Thanks,
Brian