Good morning all, While at ApacheCon we had the opportunity to bring together some of our mentors and get f2f feedback about our release candidate. We had David Nalley and Chip Childers at the table with myself and Andrew Kennedy.
The good news is that David and Chip are generally happy with the way we are progressing. The licensing issues we have had with configuration files are on a good track and they are happy that we have this in hand. However they still have serious concerns about binaries in the build, and are pushing back against our JARs in the build even if they contain their own source code. There are also a couple of SWF files - I haven't check but I'm 99% certain that they are the "copy to clipboard" support for examples in the docs and sensor values in the Brooklyn UI. One interesting snippet that was suggested is that the source release can be a *subset* of our Git tree. So we could potentially simply exclude the test *.jar and *.war, and modify our tests to gracefully disable themselves if the resource is not available. So the tests in Git would be comprehensive, and the source release would be a subset. That is a bit of a stop-gap measure, however, so the preferred option would still be to have the resources built from source in the course of a normal build, and remove the jars completely. The clipboard thing is a bit awkward. The ideal solution would be to replace with an alternative that is pure-HTML/JS. A stop-gap measure would be to make this an optional part of the build - we exclude it from the source release (disabling copy-to-clipboard) but allow the user to supply their own copy of the file. There was also some discussion about how to handle cases where we need to patch our upstream dependencies. I'll let Andrew write up that part, but the short form is that a fork is the least favourable option, but there are other options, such as copying the source file (accounting for license, of course) into Brooklyn, or checking out and building a specific Git commit ID as part of our own build process. Depending on -SNAPSHOT versions is not disallowed but is of course risky. Thanks again to Chip and David for making time for us this morning, and please reply if I've misinterpreted anything. I'd have bought you a beer, but I felt that for a breakfast meeting it perhaps wasn't appropriate. Cheers Richard.
