On Jul 18, 2008, at 10:35 AM, Joe Bohn wrote:
In the past we had asserted that a user should be able to pick up an
individual sample and build it. Because of a recent change in the
samples this is no longer possible (at least not until we release
some artifacts that can be downloaded without building locally - see
details on the issue below).
I personally think it is acceptable to provide some general
directions on building samples that require a user (at least the
first time) to checkout the entire samples svn tree and build from
the top level. It takes about 5 minutes to build all of the
samples. Following that initial build a user could choose to build
just one sample at a time. We can also provide some more complicated
directions for users that have some issue with building all of the
samples. If I don't hear any strong objections (along with
solutions to the current issue that requires a top level build) then
I will go ahead and change the doc accordingly.
I'm fine with this except I don't think we need to provide error-prone
instructions that are likely to stop working soon for people who don't
want to build all the samples.
Specifics on why this is an issue:
- We had to add in the building of a tomcat utility (Txt2Html
included in buildutil). This is used to generate html from java
source and jsp files. The html is then included with the jsp &
servlet samples and can be displayed when running the samples (we
might want to consider this for some of our other samples as well).
The utility is run via ant and so we are using the maven-antrun-
plugin. When the configuration for the execution of the utility
was included in the specific sample it worked great for just that
one sample but produced errors when attempting to build from a
higher level. This is apparently because of the way the the maven
plugin is resolved and loaded. To get the build working from the
top level we had to move the dependency of the antrun-plugin on
buildutil up under pluginmanagement. However, this has the effect
of now requiring buildutil to be available for all samples even if
it is not used (since most samples use the antrun-plugin for other
purposes). There is a maven issue that describes our problem (and
indicates that it is fixed in maven 2.1.* but not 2.0.*) - MNG-1323 (http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/MNG-1323
).
I wonder if we should write a maven plugin to do this text to html
conversion? I haven't looked at what is going on or the problem at
all. It's hard to believe there is no solution available now.
In addition to the issue above, there are other general build steps
required which will benefit from a common build process rather than
including them in each sample description. For example, we need to
make the svn repository artifacts for the specific server release
available in the user's local maven repo. I'd rather not have to
include those steps in each sample but rather point to a common build.
Maybe we should rethink our svn repository strategy. It doesn't
really work with the idea of plugins. How about if we do something
like shading the tomcat jars to another package and releasing them
with our groupId?
thanks
david jencks
Thanks,
Joe
