Obviously we have to draw the line somewhere on how many "standard" repositories to offer. My feeling is that between 5 and 10 is the right number...attempting to hit the majority of users needs.

The end result would be something like:

apply plugin: 'java'

repositories {
   mavenCentral()
   mavenCodehaus()
}

The more extensible approach would result in:

apply plugin: 'java'

repositories {
   mavenRepo 'central'
   mavenRepo 'codehaus'
}

The second syntax makes much more sense to me.

I like that. I guess the repos definitions would be part of the maven plugin. We could even make this generic. The maven plugin looks for a property/xml/groovy file which defines the repos and out of that it provides the methods above. It could also provide a hook where other plugins could add 'standard' repos.

Not sure on this.

These are all vendor/technology repos. Seems like that's a fuzzy line to walk. I think our current strategy of only having shorthands for popular aggregate repositories that everyone can potentially contribute to makes sense.

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