On Dec 4, 2006, at 8:49 PM, John Sisson wrote:
What? How did you get the idea that everyone has to use AntHill
to build Geronimo?
I didn't have the idea that everyone has to use AntHill to build
Geronimo. In my first paragraph I was only talking about automated
building/testing.
I just put my ASF hat on and asked myself who is our community?
AFAIK our community includes Geronimo users (both individuals and
companies), Geronimo developers and software vendors that
repackage the code and/or provide support ). I don't currently work
for a company that builds or sells support for Geronimo, so my only
motivation here is to ensure there is community discussion about
this proposed move.
You (or whoever) should, at any point, be able to run the build steps
by hand to produce the same end result... always assuming the correct
JDK, probably a non-windows environment, and a clean mvn repo with
decent network connectivity. Windows builds obviously take a bit
more care, but should also be able to run in the same manner with
some specific restrictions.
I think my last paragraph was confusing. When I wrote it, I was
wondering whether some time in the future, "proper" releases would
only be built, tested and packaged from automated builds and
whether it is realistic for someone to do a full build, test,
package manually.
Nope, manual builds should always work assuming you have your
environment setup up correctly. The automation system simply ensure
that environment.
Has Geronimo's building and testing and release packaging has
become complex enough that for an ISV to realistically provide
support for Geronimo they would pretty much need a build and
testing automation setup like you are suggesting?
Yes, IMO the build for Geronimo, to ensure that everything is in
order, built from know components has gotten quite complex and any
ISV building in any automated fashion would want a similar setup to
ensure that everything is built using the proper dependencies. But
really any moderate to complex project would want that. And from
what I can tell none of the open solutions allow you to do that with
any degree of easy or flexibility.
If we tell them they have to license AntHill is that reasonable?
What does the community think?
I don't think we would ever tell anyone they *have* to use anything.
Its like, we use JIRA to manage our bugs... and then telling vendors
that if they use G, they have to use JIRA to manage their bugs...
which would never happen.
For example, if a developer without commit access wanted to do
automated builds and testing of modifications to Geronimo on their
home PC or at their company (then is the AntHill license flexible
enough to let them do that, or is the license limited to Apache
hardware or individual Apache committers?
Such a developer could use AntHill if they wanted... or CC, or
QuickBuild, or ParaBuild, etc...
Why does it matter?
Basically, G does not deliver any automated build functionality to
its users... just as it does not deliver any issue tracking or web
content authoring tools, all of which are critical to the success of
the project.
It seems like you are lumping them up with our deliverables. I think
they are completely unrelated.
--jason
