Preserving comments

[paulvi]

While translating (e.g. migrating from .xml) information written in comments is lost.

Comments before/after any section can't be in Model, so it is for translators to keep more data

[mosabua]

This seems to be a non-crucial feature and I am inclined to close the issue. Any objections? Or anybody wanting to send a PR that implements it for the various dialects? Or for one as an example at least?

[paulvi]

objection. I consider pom as code, and comments to be important part of it.

For example, why a dependency is needed, or what a plugin is for.
In team environment it is important to preserve knowledge, and tools should help, not constrain.

[mosabua]

Fair point. Wanna send a PR?

[mkristian]

we can do translate POMs back and forth. the translation from pom.xml to pom.rb is straight forward, the other way around you have builder methods here and there, so a lot of coding around the actual DSL. I doubt a general translation of comments to xml-comments is feasible and can be meaningful.

[lefou]

Although I'm not saying preserving the comments isn't possible (in fact, I have some ideas), I would argue, it is not worth the effort. Or at least not for those dialects representing full programming languages like the ruby or scala dialect.

In most cases I use the translation from XML only once, to have an initial starting point. Later I use the translation to XML whenever I need integration into other tools. But the output looks more like the result of help:effective-pom, which doesn't preserve comments neither (I didn't checked). As the generated XML has a very different struckture than the source pom.scala, any preserved comment would have a high potential to tell a lie.

[lefou]

What I really want is a single most prominent comment saying, that the file was generated. But that's another story.

[jdimeo]

I would vote more for preserving comments from original translation from XML as being more important than preserving them back to XML after editing