Re: thoughts on new builds (was: Re: [UPDATE] Converting existing taglibs to use new build)

[Glenn Nielsen <gl...@voyager.apg.more.net>]

I have a proposal.

Why not give everyone a few weeks or so to use the new system.
Then we can call a VOTE on it.

Glenn

James Strachan wrote:
> 
> Fair enough Glenn, lets agree to disagree.
> 
> > The topic of whether jar files should be checked into CVS has been
> discussed
> > numerous times on a number of jakarta lists.
> >
> > I prefer not checking jar files into cvs for a number of reasons:
> >
> > 1. Some dependent jar files can not be distributed by ASF, examples are
> >    the jdbc-2.0.ext.jar (dbtags), and the JavaMail jar (mailer).
> > 2. Some dependent jar files may not have a compatible license or the
> >    license may require the complete API distribution.
> 
> Sure - 1 & 2 means not all JARS can be in CVS. Though most JARs certainly
> can be (e.g. 1 or 2 out of 12 today)
> 
> > 3. Committing jar's to CVS significantly increases the time to checkout or
> >    update the cvs repository.  As the number of taglibs in the project
> >    grows, the number of jars checked in will increase, further slowing
> down
> >    cvs checkout's and updates.
> 
> Like I said, I'm sure there's a way we can make downloading the jars
> optional, like by using .cvsignore. Or having a seperate
> jakarta-taglibs-jars module. Remember people don't have to checkout/download
> all of the jakarta-taglibs from the cvs repository if they don't want to -
> they could just checkout a few taglibs.
> 
> I'm certainly happy to pay the price as it saves developers much time.
> Though I'm looking at it from a developer (end user) perspective rather than
> Pier & Justy are from a sysadmin perspective.
> 
> > 4. To implement what you propose and get the build to work out of the box
> >    for the current taglibs, there would be more than a dozen jar files in
> >    jakarta-taglibs/lib:
> 
> I think thats a price worth paying. "To get the build to work out of the
> box" is what I'm after rather than require many hours of tinkering for every
> developer who wants to just build jakarta-taglibs locally.
> 
> > Because of 1 & 2 above, users who build from source will still have to
> > resolve jar API dependencies in a build.properties file.
> 
> Sure - but only for 1 or 2 jars. The other 11 or so could be configured in
> build.properties.
> 
> > I am -1 on your proposal, +1 on removing jar files from CVS.
> >
> > If the build.properties file is well documented, users who build from
> source
> > can resolve the dependencies easily.  And once they have them resolved,
> > changes will be infrequent.
> 
> I agree its possible, my point is that it just takes alot of time for *each*
> developer who downloads the source. I'd rather the author of each taglib
> take care of all this for them.
> 
> I doubt I'm ever going to have the cycles to go trawling around the web,
> downloading these (say) 12 different jars for all the taglibs then setting
> up a build.properties to point to them all just to get the jakarta-taglibs
> build to work on my machine. So I'll probably just build a couple of
> taglibs. I'm sure others will follow this path too.
> 
> This is probably fine, its a great argument for nightly builds and binary
> releases but I think we'll miss out on people (like me) who might spot
> issues, conficts and problems with other taglibs.
> 
> Maybe its time to put more effort into the CJAN proposal on jakarta-commons
> to fix this JAR dependency problem once and for all...
> 
> James
> 
> _________________________________________________________
> Do You Yahoo!?
> Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com

-- 
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Glenn Nielsen             glenn@more.net | /* Spelin donut madder    |
MOREnet System Programming               |  * if iz ina coment.      |
Missouri Research and Education Network  |  */                       |
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Re: thoughts on new builds (was: Re: [UPDATE] Converting existing taglibs to use new build)

[Glenn Nielsen <gl...@voyager.apg.more.net>]

Shawn Bayern wrote:
> 
> On Wed, 11 Jul 2001, Glenn Nielsen wrote:
> 
> > I have a proposal.
> >
> > Why not give everyone a few weeks or so to use the new system.
> > Then we can call a VOTE on it.
> 
> There are also middle-ground ideas, like providing a little script written
> in Java to download the necessary libraries.  (Does Ant support anything
> like that?  An "acquire and unpack" action?)  If we kept all the relevant
> URLs to libraries up to date, such a process might be as easy as including
> all of our dependencies in CVS, and might not have any of the drawbacks
> (which I agree are severe) of including other distributions with ours.
> 
> Shawn

That is a great idea Shawn!

Ant does support getting files from remote systems using the <get> tag.
The only potential drawback are those remote sites which require a login
to download the jar file or distribution (Some Sun provided Java API's).

Hmmm, I wonder if we can get anyone to volunteer to test and/or implement
this. James seems to have the itch that needs scatching. ;-)

Regards,

Glenn

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Glenn Nielsen             glenn@more.net | /* Spelin donut madder    |
MOREnet System Programming               |  * if iz ina coment.      |
Missouri Research and Education Network  |  */                       |
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Re: thoughts on new builds (was: Re: [UPDATE] Converting existing taglibs to use new build)

[James Strachan <ja...@yahoo.co.uk>]

From: "Shawn Bayern" <ba...@essentially.net>
> > I have a proposal.
> >
> > Why not give everyone a few weeks or so to use the new system.
> > Then we can call a VOTE on it.
>
> There are also middle-ground ideas, like providing a little script written
> in Java to download the necessary libraries.  (Does Ant support anything
> like that?  An "acquire and unpack" action?)  If we kept all the relevant
> URLs to libraries up to date, such a process might be as easy as including
> all of our dependencies in CVS, and might not have any of the drawbacks
> (which I agree are severe) of including other distributions with ours.

Agreed - the JARs don't need to be in CVS - just some standard place. Then
setting up an Ant target to download them would be great.

Ant has a <get> task which works on http / ftp so it should be fairly
straightforward to cobble something simple together. Though I'll investigate
how the CJAN project is going to see if there's a more elegant solution as
this is a general problem with jakarta projects.

James


_________________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com

Re: thoughts on new builds (was: Re: [UPDATE] Converting existing taglibs to use new build)

[Shawn Bayern <ba...@essentially.net>]

On Wed, 11 Jul 2001, Glenn Nielsen wrote:

> I have a proposal.
> 
> Why not give everyone a few weeks or so to use the new system.
> Then we can call a VOTE on it.

There are also middle-ground ideas, like providing a little script written
in Java to download the necessary libraries.  (Does Ant support anything
like that?  An "acquire and unpack" action?)  If we kept all the relevant
URLs to libraries up to date, such a process might be as easy as including
all of our dependencies in CVS, and might not have any of the drawbacks
(which I agree are severe) of including other distributions with ours.

Shawn