Gump status, design & direction

[Michael Davey <Mi...@coderage.org>]

Hello,

I am trying to get to grips with Gump and am confusing myself with 
respect to the various build mechanisms.  I've read pretty much every 
message in the archive covering the last eight weeks and searched for 
likely terms in the other messages to get an idea of the history.

As I understand it, there are essentially 3 subprojects:

  *  shell Gump (the original, using a mixture of jenny.jar, build.sh, 
update.sh, nag.pl, gen.sh and gump.sh (or .bat), plus xslt transformations)
  *  Ant Gump (experimental - shell still needed for some targets/tasks)
  *  Python Gump (also experimental - I haven't looked too closely at 
this one)

Now, gen.sh does all its Java stuff directly, while gump.sh uses Ant for 
some of the Java targets.

I was planning to make some minor improvements to gump.sh and was also 
considering replacing some of the scripting with Ant targets - is the 
latter the right thing to do?  gen.sh shouldn't use Ant targets, but may 
directly call into Jenny.jar, right?

Actually, it would be nice to have STATUS, STATUS-ANT and STATUS-PYTHON 
files for us newbies, so we don't ask (so many) stupid questions on the 
alias ;)

Finally, is the long-term plan that shell Gump gets replaced with Ant 
and/or Python or that all three are offered and users choose the one 
best suited to their needs?

-- 
Michael

RE: Gump status, design & direction

[Adam Jack <aj...@trysybase.com>]

I am a recent user, not a long time gump developer, but that caveat given
... here is my understanding:

	As I understand it, there are essentially 3 subprojects:

	  *  shell Gump (the original, using a mixture of jenny.jar, build.sh,
	update.sh, nag.pl, gen.sh and gump.sh (or .bat), plus xslt transformations)
	  *  Ant Gump (experimental - shell still needed for some targets/tasks)
	  *  Python Gump (also experimental - I haven't looked too closely at
	this one)

I don't believe so. Both shell (aka shell/XSLT) and Python launch ant to do
builds. There is no separate "ant gump". Some parts of "shell gump" (within
gen.sh) are implemented as ant tasks.

	Now, gen.sh does all its Java stuff directly, while gump.sh uses Ant for
	some of the Java targets.

Not really. Gump.sh is a utility wrapper to follow the steps you could do
manually in :

	http://jakarta.apache.org/gump/usage.html

It is used by some folks from cron (it is *nix only) to automate a gump run.

BTW: I tried working on a gumppy.sh to wrapper Python gump.

	Finally, is the long-term plan that shell Gump gets replaced with Ant
	and/or Python or that all three are offered and users choose the one
	best suited to their needs?

Python was proposed as a replacement for shell/XSLT, but it has stalled
somewhat recently. The jury is still out on a long term plan, some might
call it a hung jury. I'd stick w/ plain old gump for now.

regards,

Adam