Hi all, I must admit that I agree on the status especially regarding 2 points: 1. new contributors obstacles: gradle learning curve might be too long for spare-time contributors, also complex scripted build takes time to understand comparing to self-descriptive one. 2. IDE integration kind of slows down development.
Now, regarding how we improve the situation, I think we need to discuss and identify tasks and tackle them all together even if they are not sexy tasks as Ismaël mentioned. Etienne Le mardi 09 octobre 2018 à 10:04 +0200, Jean-Baptiste Onofré a écrit : > Hi guys, > > I know that's a hot topic, but I have to bring this discussion on the table. > > Some months ago, we discussed about migrating our build from Maven to > Gradle. One of the key expected improvement was the time to build. > We proposed to do a PoC to evaluate the impacts and improvements, but > this PoC was actually directly a migrate on master. > > Now, I would like to bring facts here: > > 1. Build time > On my machine, the build time is roughly 1h15. It's pretty long, and > regarding what the build is doing, I don't see huge improvement provided > by Gradle. > 2. Build reliability > Even worse, most of the time, we need to use --no-parallel and > --no-daemon to have a reliable build (it's basically recommended for > release). It has an impact on build time, and we loose part of Gradle > benefits. > 3. Release and repositories > Even if couple of releases has been performed with Gradle, it's not > obvious to see improvements around artifacts handling. I got my > repository polluted twice (that's part of the trick Gradle is doing to > speed up the build dealing around the repository). > 4. IDE integration > We already had some comments on the mailing lists about the IDE > integration. Clearly, the situation is not good on that front too. The > integration on IDE (especially IntelliJ) is not good enough right now. > > We are working hard to grow up the community, and from a contributor > perspective, our build system is not good today IMHO. > As a contributor, I resumed my work on some PRs, and I'm spending so > much time of the build, largely more than working on the PRs code itself. > > So, obviously, the situation is not perfect, at least from a contributor > perspective. > > The purpose of this thread is not again to have a bunch of replied > ending nowhere. I would like to be more "pushy" and let's try to be > concrete. So basically, we only have two options: > > 1. Improve the build, working hard on Gradle front. Not sure if it makes > such sense from a contributor perspective, as Maven is really well known > from most of contributors (and easier to start with IMHO). > 2. Back on Maven. That's clearly my preferred approach. IDE integration > is better, Maven is well known from the contributors as already said. > The effort is not so huge. We tried to use Gradle, we don't have the > expected results now, that's not a problem, it's part of a project lifetime. > > Thoughts ? > > Regards > JB > >
