Each language Avro supports should be a separate package
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Key: AVRO-163
URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/AVRO-163
Project: Avro
Issue Type: Improvement
Components: c, c++, java, python
Affects Versions: 1.2.0, 1.1.0, 1.0.0
Environment: We currently release Avro as a single monolithic tarball
with ant being used to build all the languages that Avro supports.
Reporter: Matt Massie
Assignee: Matt Massie
Priority: Critical
Fix For: 1.2.1, 1.3.0
*Build Issue*
While ant is used for building Java projects, it is almost never used to build
python, c++ or c projects. C and C++ projects are often managed using
autotools while Python uses setuptools. Forcing these languages to use a
foreign build system ('ant') is suboptimal and will cause us headaches as we
move forward.
*Release issue*
Releasing a single monolithic package forces users of one language to download
binary and source for all languages. For example, at this time the Avro C
distribution is only 384K in size (built using autotools 'make distcheck'
target). People interested in using the C implementation would be forced to
download a large monolithic tarball (currently 3.8 MB) that includes dozens of
third-party jar files for the Java implementation. Furthermore, C users would
be forced to use 'ant' as the top-level build tool. This monolithic approach
would also prevent us from submitting Avro for inclusion in Linux distribution
yum/apt repositories as RPM and Debian packages. It's important to allow C/C++
code to have a pristine release tarball on which to base Debian and RPM
packaging.
*Solution*
Create top-level directories: 'java', 'python', 'c++ ' , 'c', 'shared' and
'release'. Each language directory would contain the source for that language
and use the build system natural for that language, e.g. ant, autotools,
setuptools, gem, etc. The 'shared' directory would have, for example, common
test schema and data files for interoperability testing between each language.
A simple top-level bash script would call into each language to build a release
package, documentation, etc. into the 'release' directory. Each Avro release
would then be compromised of package(s) for each language Avro supports, e.g.
avro-java-1.2.3.tar.gz, pyavro-1.2.3.tar.gz, avro-c++-1.2.3.tar.gz and
avro-c-1.2.3.tar.gz. Later on, we'll also likely have
libavro-devel-1.2.3-1.x86_64.rpm too.
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