I'd prefer not adding additional complexity to the release build, and to have regular builds do as much checking in advance of doing release builds, as possible.
The problem this fixed was that committers *weren't* checking license files, and a few people who noticed had to go back and clean up after others. Putting it in the release profile only defers that to the release manager, which slows down releasing. What we can do, to help contributors, is update the .gitignore files to ignore these build items in specific modules (the ones that exist for the given branch) so that ones leftover from a previous branch show up as new files when switching to a branch where the previous module no longer exists (because they won't be ignored by git and hidden from 'git status'). Additionally, we could stop recommending people use "git clean -fdx" and actually help them understand how to identify the issue by suggesting they actually read the build output and respond to it accordingly (eg. open target/rat.txt and find the offending issues and triage whether those are actually missing licenses or are simply leftover from a previous branch). -- Christopher L Tubbs II http://gravatar.com/ctubbsii On Tue, Jun 17, 2014 at 2:44 PM, Sean Busbey <[email protected]> wrote: > I've had a few different new-to-Accumulo contributors recently run into the > issue of Rat failing the build after changing branches. > > I know we already have a warning about this[1], but AFAICT it's over the > threshold for consumable information. > > Even after pointing people to the warning, the existing workaround tripped > up atleast one of them. Despite the warning about using "git clean," the > destruction of their local IDE changes were surprising. > > For contributions to Accumulo that aren't coming from committers, the Rat > plugin seems much more likely to give a false positive than to catch an > error. Additionally, whatever committer is reviewing the contribution > should be checking for license compliance anyways. > > In the interests of reducing the surprise for new contributors, I'd like to > move our use of Rat to a profile that is only default enabled during a > release run. > > The profile would still let those who want rat to run on every build to > enable it and we could update the guide for handling new contributions to > say committers should enable the rat profile to help guard against errors. > > Any objections? > > [1]: http://accumulo.apache.org/source.html#running-a-build > > -- > Sean >
