Tomcat, ant and build misery

["Hill, Roger" <rh...@netperceptions.com>]

At the risk of getting flamed ;-|  , I would like to ask why it necessary
for the jakarta/tomcat project to make the build process so incredibly
painful (which IMHO is at least one side effect of going out on a limb and
create their own build  tools to replace make). I have build just about
every GNU/linux software package there is over te last few years on Solaris,
Linux, HP-UX, but I have rarely had as many problems as I have had in the
last few days trying to build tomcat, and I can safely say that I have never
had such difficulty in resolving those problems.

I ask this because I have spent today trying to build tomcat, trying to
build ant without the slightest sign of any success. Of course if the build
process was make based, I think I would have at least a (tom)cat in hell's
chance of figuring it out, but life is too short, so I'm writing to the
mailing list.

The platform I am using could hardly me more standard ( Solaris 7, recently
installed and fully patched, Sun JDK 1.2.2). I have jakarta-tomcat and
jakarta tools checked out in parallel (as laid down in the  tomcat README).

When I try to build tomcat it starts spewing out errors such as :-

bash-2.03$ build.sh
Buildfile: build.xml
Detected Java Version: 1.2
Project base dir set to: /home/gnu/jakarta-tomcat
Executing Target: prepare
Executing Target: main
Compiling 248 source files to /home/gnu/build/tomcat/classes 
/home/gnu/jakarta-tomcat/src/share/org/apache/tomcat/service/TcpEndpoint.jav
a:276: Class 
org.apache.tomcat.service.TcpListenerThread already defined in 
/home/gnu/jakarta-tomcat/src/share/org/apache/tomcat/service/SimpleTcpEndpoi
nt.java.
class TcpListenerThread implements Runnable {
      ^
.... and so on for at least another hundred errors.

Oh and where is the documentation to ant? The docs directory cotnains
nothing more enlightening than an 
index.html file.

By the way, the tomcat binary distribution checks out and runs just fine, so
I don't think there is anything fundamentally wrong with the platform.

Any idea's anyone?

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
-------
Roger Hill
Net Perceptions UK
tel +44 (1628) 640438   -   mobile +44 (7803) 032892

Re: Tomcat, ant and build misery

[Costin Manolache <co...@eng.sun.com>]

Hi Roger,

No flame from me. We use ant because we believe it will make the
build process simpler and easier :-)

The magic is to use the right version of ant ( well, it's like with make -
the verion and type of make matters - gnumake, etc  ).

Probably a good solution would be checking in ant.jar. Xalan does it and
many other projects using ant, and this way we can be sure we use  the
right ant.

Costin



"Hill, Roger" wrote:

> At the risk of getting flamed ;-|  , I would like to ask why it necessary
> for the jakarta/tomcat project to make the build process so incredibly
> painful (which IMHO is at least one side effect of going out on a limb and
> create their own build  tools to replace make). I have build just about
> every GNU/linux software package there is over te last few years on Solaris,
> Linux, HP-UX, but I have rarely had as many problems as I have had in the
> last few days trying to build tomcat, and I can safely say that I have never
> had such difficulty in resolving those problems.