Hi Kevin, My projects opt for independent versioning of modules to facilitate "release early, release often." To do this for large sets of components like yours requires a Bill of Materials -- i.e., common parent POM with dependencyManagement section.
FWIW, the docs we have about our projects that work this way are at: * http://imagej.net/Architecture And in particular: * http://imagej.net/Architecture#Bill_of_Materials * http://imagej.net/Architecture#How_SciJava_achieves_reproducible_builds * http://imagej.net/Philosophy#Release_early.2C_release_often And the BOM stuff is at: * https://github.com/scijava/pom-scijava/blob/pom-scijava-8.3.0/pom.xml#L103-L819 The downside, as you point out, of all components being release version coupled is that it is annoying to have to do a "release cascade" to propagate a bug fix from the lowest level components to the highest level ones. We have some tooling to make that easier (I personally live in the "releases should be as easy/automated/fast as possible" camp), but the modularity does cost time sometimes. Hopefully a lot less time than building your huge multi-module project from scratch every time, though! I also recently wrote a "melting pot" script to do end-to-end testing of large component collections: https://github.com/scijava/scijava-scripts/blob/d892adc0092c220ee1e597b9fb5a1fb067e4509b/melting-pot.sh This script builds and runs unit tests for all components of a large collection at their respective versions, all in the same Java runtime, to ensure that everything _really does_ work together at the versions you are currently deploying to end users. I would be happy to know about other tooling people have created to help with this sort of project structure. Regards, Curtis On Tue, Sep 22, 2015 at 12:47 PM, Kevin Burton <bur...@spinn3r.com> wrote: > We have a multi-module setup whereby we have about 150 independent modules. > > Our build takes a long time and actually slows down development as we have > to do a compile of a LOT of source code to rebuild the project. > > Additionally, we have a lot of code that we want to Open Source. > > This has meant git submodules the IMO git submodules really don’t work when > using branches. They break and require a whole bunch of custom works and > hack and when they DO break it’s confusing how to resolve them. > > This has meant that we’ve not really done a good job of OSSing our code > base as its just too hard. > > What we’ve done to date is just have one major version number across all > our projects. So upgrading them and fixing their dependencies means that I > just have to change a version number everywhere and I’m done. > > What I was thinking of is changing this strategy to use the maven > "versions:use-latest-versions” plugin. > > What i would do is have a parent directory named ‘spinn3r’ which just has a > bunch of git submodules. We NEVER branch in this directory. > > It also means that any of our developers can check it out so that they have > all of our source code. > > At this point I can use a normal development strategy for each project. > They don’t use submodules which enables us to branch/merge easily. > > I can also have a dedicated IntelliJ or Eclipse project for each one and > switch between them. > > Now the main issue I have is how do I bump releases easily and make sure > all my code is using the latest version of its sibling projects. > > In the parent directory I can just run versions:use-latest-versions … on > each one of the projects so that it automatically pulled in the latest > version after a release. > > The only problem here is that there’s a dependency graph that needs to be > considered. > > for example, if project A depends on project B, then we have to bump the > version and push project B into maven before we upgrade dependencies on > project A. > > This is a frustrating issue… > > -- > > We’re hiring if you know of any awesome Java Devops or Linux Operations > Engineers! > > Founder/CEO Spinn3r.com > Location: *San Francisco, CA* > blog: http://burtonator.wordpress.com > … or check out my Google+ profile > <https://plus.google.com/102718274791889610666/posts> >
