Gump and CocoonDev

[Sam Ruby]

OK, it looks like Cocoon's core well on its way to reliably compiling 
every day with Gump.  Lately Avalon has gotten a reappreciation of the 
importance of backwards compatibility.  This is very very good.

Progress towards compiling cocoon's blocks is held up due to the fact 
that the indicated target, gump-core, does not in fact build a jar. 
Looking into the build.xml, this appears to be due to an architectural 
issue that is being worked.  Once this issue is resolved, progress will 
resume.  The goal is clearly to get Forrest to build and run.

I've prep'ed cocoondev.org, and am nearly ready to try a full build. 
Preping involved installing the necessary packages [1], tailoring some 
of the paths in nagoya.xml to produce cocoondev.xml, and determining the 
appropriate value for JAVA_HOME.  I've done some limited testing, 
including running gen, update all, and individual builds of 
bootstrap-ant and ant.

Before I do a full build, I would like to note a few things and ask a 
few questions.  Execution of a number of builds involve testing.  Some 
builds require Xvfb in order to work.  I notice that there is an 
instance of this process currently running: can I depend on that?  What 
should I set DISPLAY to?  Also a number of tests involve attempts to 
create test web servers.  Inevitably, this involves port 8080 which I 
note is currently in use.  This may be a problem.  Suggestions?

In order to minimize impact to others, builds will be run only once a 
day, and will utilize the "nice" command to allow all other processes to 
have priority.  Builds will be run during the late night hours in most 
European locations - the first portion of which will be mostly cvs 
update and local rsync, neither of which are CPU or memory intensive 
operations.  The builds themselves will be single threaded and run in a 
low priority as indicated above.

Once this is accomplished, I'll look into two things: publishing the 
results and moving the data to a location where everybody with the 
ability to log onto cocoondev can do updates and builds of any and all 
individual projects in between nightly runs.  I fully expect people will 
find this ability to be very addictive and helpful in isolating and 
resolving inter component issues.

Finally, I'll look into establishing a cocoon profile which does not 
include everything that gump normally builds, but only contains those 
elements which are part of the greater cocoon ecosystem.

Steven, let me know what you think and if this is the wrong mailing list 
to discuss these items.

- Sam Ruby

[1] http://cvs.apache.org/builds/gump/latest/packages.html