Thinking about this some more I believe we need to make a good decision here as having to revisit
this issue in the future will cause users to have to change how the server works. I've been talking
to a new user that has a larger server farm and is very interested in the Geronimo server as their
new foundation. However, they run a few thousand servers and are VERY sensitive to changes in the
behaviour of the server in terms of how it impacts them. Changes to the repsoistory will affect
their operational experience dramatically and they do run Windows (go Bill Gates). They are
watching this thread with keen interest. Their biggest concern is changing how their build and
distribution system works and changes in this area is highly disruptive for them.
My view of the problem is that there are really three distinct areas of a path. They are the user
area, the server area and the application area. Let me splain...
| 0000000000000000000000000000 | 11111111111111111111111111111111111111111 |
2222222222222222222 ...
C:\my\directory\before\geronimo\geronimo-1.1\repository\com.apache.geronimo\console-1.1\appArtifacts
The area in the 0's are controlled by the user and we need to leave more headroom than a few
characters so they can manage multiple deployments of Geronimo; this could include multiple versions
or multiple deployments. The users probably enjoy flexibility in naming as much as we do. We don't
have control over this but we influence how much headroom is available.
The 1's is really the area we have control over as this is the server proper. This includes the
area from the top of the tree to the end of where the files we create end. So, for instance, this
includes var, repository, etc. Since were currently experiencing this problem in the respository I
think we should focus on this area.
Finally, the 2's are the area that include the application and Maven dependent information. The
Maven naming convention is verbose. The current implementation needs to be changed, the question is
how and can the change survive several releases so that our users are not forced to change their
deployments on each subsequent release. *One immediate thought I had was to place applications back
into the config-store (or equivalent name). Rather than simply use a number as we did previously
perhaps the configId of the deployment would be appropriate. Its human readable and would be
shorter than the current maven structure.* I highlighted the previous as I think this is the best
option based on what I know today.
Perhaps there some way to provide a Maven abstraction that would map Maven dir names to an internal
format for us. I expect if we are running into this its only a matter of time befoew other Maven
users experience the same issues. For us its the nesting of Maven articacts / configurations that
is causing us the problem. Jason, thoughts?
Whatever we decide we need to ensure that it is stable enough to work for a
period of time.
Matt
Dain Sundstrom wrote:
Man I hate Windows....
Anyway, if you have a real OS and list the files in an assembly, you
will see that the problem is caused by the combination of two changes:
we now keep configurations in the repository and we unpack them. If you
look closer you will see that the big offenders are unpacked ears and
wars.
I believe the following are the longest paths in the server:
(270)
geronimo-1.1-SNAPSHOT/repository/geronimo/daytrader-derby-jetty/1.1-
SNAPSHOT/daytrader-derby-jetty-1.1-SNAPSHOT.car/daytrader-web-1.1-
SNAPSHOT.war/META-INF/geronimo-generated/org/apache/geronimo/axis/
client/GenericServiceEndpointWrapper$$EnhancerByCGLIB$$36344d29.class
(264)
geronimo-1.1-SNAPSHOT/repository/geronimo/webconsole-jetty/1.1-
SNAPSHOT/webconsole-jetty-1.1-SNAPSHOT.car/geronimo-console-
standard-1.1-SNAPSHOT.war/WEB-INF/classes/org/apache/geronimo/console/
databasemanager/wizard/DatabasePoolPortlet$ResourceAdapterParams.class
One thing to note here is that the longest paths are all classes
generated by Geronimo, nested classes in wars or compiled JSP pages.
Someone should look into makeing maven jar the latter two and Geronimo
should be creating jars when generating classes (actually we should
stop generating classes a head of time but that is another story).
Breaking down the longest path, we have:
GeronimoName (22)
geronimo-1.1-SNAPSHOT
RepositoryPath (55)
repository/geronimo/daytrader-derby-jetty/1.1-SNAPSHOT
FileName (39)
daytrader-derby-jetty-1.1-SNAPSHOT.car
NestedPath (154)
daytrader-web-1.1-SNAPSHOT.war/META-INF/geronimo-generated/org/
apache/geronimo/axis/client/GenericServiceEndpointWrapper$
$EnhancerByCGLIB$$36344d29.class
The first thing to note is if we simply replace "SNAPSHOT" with "0", we
drop 28 characters which makes the longest path 242; not enough head
room. Of course, when we switch our groupId to the maven standard
org.apache.geronimo we eat up 20 more characters. If we are going to
unpack war files there is very little we can do about the NestedPath,
so we have very few choices left. If we simply combine combine
${GeronimoName}/${FileName}/${NestedPath} we are up to 115 characters
leaving only 41 characters for anything else, but when you add back the
28 from "SNAPSHOT", you get to a more comfortable level.
I think if we combine this problem with Sachin's request for a separate
directory for applications, we could do something like this:
${GeronimoName}/apps/${FileName}/${NestedPath}
There are several problems with this. I think users will confuse the
hot-deploy directory "deploy" with the "apps" directory [1]. Then
again, if you look at the problem configurations they are all apps the
users may want to remove (sample apps and the console), so may be we
should just put these in the hot-deploy directory. Another problem is
that it will be much more difficult to query a repository without a
directory structure. The server will basically have to read the
configuration from these apps on startup to determine what they are, so
again we may just want to use the hot-deploy directory. I'm not a fan
of the hot-deploy directory, but I'm not sure there is a better solution.
Again I renew my hate of Windows...
/me shakes his fist at Bill Gates
-dain
[1] As a side issue, I prefer the name "apps" because it will be most
familiar to tomcat users.
