Conor MacNeill wrote: > > Actually this is the strength of the gump system. If we add > a feature, even experimental, to Ant, it is nice to see it > being used and tested in other projects. We don't want to > wait till we get to a release to have featured used in anger. > So, isn't one of gump's roles to be that early warning > system as those features evolve.
This benefit only exists if core projects are responsive. > I think a released version of a project must only depend on > released versions of its prerequesite projects. By relying > on an alpha feature of another project, you are making your > project alpha as well. That is OK, but we should expect > regular failures on gump. I expect failures. For example, I haven't complained once about the many changes to the output directory structure produced by Ant builds (which have caused more than a few worthless runs, I might point out). And, by the way, I'm not terribly upset about this particular issue (but I still want it fixed!) - it just was conveniently timed as I was looking for an example so that we could explore the larger issue. My goal is not to make people defensive or point fingers, but rather to make more people aware of the impact of both their changes when the make them, and lack of responsiveness when they don't. And actually, what I was hoping to discuss was what you got to in your next paragraph: > It would be nice to have a single consolidated output of the > whole gump build to easily locate projects that are using > deprecated features. We can then help those projects to update. > Also perhaps each project in gump should have an attached > mailing list which is notified of build failures in the gump > system. That sort of regular (push) reminder would help rather > than having to check the website (pull). Hmmm. I hadn't thought about a consolidated output. The predecessor to this (still present at http://oss.software.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/jakarta/buildlog.html ) produced a consolidated output, and even with links it was difficult to use. But if it were in ADDITION to the nicely formatted HTML...hmm. That's something I want to think about. Status update: I'm in the midst of back-porting this to Linux. Once it got back to Linux, it was my intent to automate the execution (currently it is still kicked off manually on my thinkpad). Then I was going to add the ability to register regular expressions, which if matched would cause notifications to be sent to the mailing address of your choice. Note: I *finally* have figured out how to navigate my way through my corporate firewall and past the ssh and onto the Apache web site. So nightly builds of Ant should resume shortly (I'm inclined to make this gump based at the same time) and the tinderbox will also move from the IBM web site to the Apache one. - Sam Ruby
