Hi community! I created a proof-of-concept how we could use jitpack.io for fineract-cn projects. With this email I would start a discussion if and how we could get these changes done. I hope you have some time to go through my rather long email and maybe even look at the proof-of-concept that I put together (references in the end of email) and join the discussion.
My opinion is that although some changes are needed I feel that the benefits are worth some of the inconveniences that come with some of the renamings. So let's start from the beginning. I was looking into jitpack.io for two reasons: 1) to add travis-ci to fineract-cn projects we need a mechanism to keep and serve all the dependencies to other fineract-cn projects. 2) to publish public docker images for fineract-cn projects then we need some service (that is not someones personal computer) to build the jar-s first. If you are not familiar with fineract-cn then I can give you a quick example of the problem: In order to build fineract-cn-portfolio you need (among other things) fineract-cn-rhythm built first. In order to build fineract-cn-rhythm you need fineract-cn-identity. In order to build fineract-cn-identity you need fineract-cn-anubis. In order to build fineract-cn-anubis you need fineract-cn-api In order to build fineract-cn-api you need fineract-cn-lang. So jitpack.io should be just the service what is needed for this. While in maven central you have to publish each version then jitpack just clones the code from a public repo, builds it and if the build is successful starts to serve it. You can refer to both latest successful build of a branch, to a tagged version or use commit hash instead of a version number. So the service is very flexible. My goal was to find out what changes (if any) would be needed to adapt. And also build a proof-of-concept (not to stay only theoretical). 1. The first problem was that fineract-ch projects are hosted in github but fineract-cn uses a domain name (org.apache.fineract.cn) instead of com.github.username. Jitpack supports custom domain names but after some tests and contacting with them ( https://github.com/jitpack/jitpack.io/issues/3781) it came clear that they don't (yet) support subdomains (so org.apache would work but not org.apache.fineract.cn). To overcome the first issue fineract-cn projects should change group names of artifacts from org.apache.fineract.cn to com.github.apache (until jitpack.io starts to support subdomains). For official releases in Maven Central it would be possible still to use org.apache.fineract.cn group names. Of course, it would be inconvenient but in my opinion it would be doable. 2. The second problem of using jitpack.io is that the repository name is built deeply into its logic. If you have a public repository: https://github.com/username/repository-name then "repository-name" has to appear either in the group name or in the artifact name. So for fineract-cn projects it would mean changes. Currently simpler projects (lang, async, api, test) you require like this: [group: 'org.apache.fineract.cn', name: 'lang', version: versions.frameworklang], to use jitpack.io these would change to: [group: 'com.github.apache', name: 'fineract-cn-lang', version: versions.frameworklang], And the main projects (that have sub-projects) that are currently required like this: [group: 'org.apache.fineract.cn.identity', name: 'api'], would change to: [group: 'com.github.apache.fineract-cn-identity', name: 'api', version: rootProject.version], (and in released versions and once jitpack would start to support subdomains it would change to: [group: 'org.apache.fineract.cn.fineract-cn-identity', name: 'api'], 3. A third change is also needed. Jitpack has snapshots in a form of: branchname-SNAPSHOT since fineract-cn projects are all in develop branch it would mean changing to 0.1.0-BUILD-SNAPSHOT -> develop-SNAPSHOT In my opinion this shouldn't be a problem - this is just matter of whatever we agree to use. So I created a (rather-huge) proof-of-concept to get this list of changes. I created a separate github user "mobjex" and forked all fineract-cn projects. Then I added jitpack.io to list of repositories and started making changes that I described above. Since I crated a separate github user I had to use "mobjex" anywhere instead of "apache". But this is just proof-of-concept and once we agree on the idea this will be all replaced back to "apache". My goal was to get jitpack to build an serve identity project (I chose a subset of all the projects): As you can see from the banner I managed to build it with jitpack: https://github.com/mobjex/fineract-cn-identity/ you can see the changes I had to make here: https://github.com/apache/fineract-cn-identity/compare/develop...mobjex:develop also, I had to make changes to all the projects that identity depends on so I changed: https://github.com/apache/fineract-cn-anubis/compare/develop...mobjex:develop https://github.com/apache/fineract-cn-api/compare/develop...mobjex:develop https://github.com/apache/fineract-cn-lang/compare/develop...mobjex:develop https://github.com/apache/fineract-cn-test/compare/develop...mobjex:develop https://github.com/apache/fineract-cn-async/compare/develop...mobjex:develop https://github.com/apache/fineract-cn-lang/compare/develop...mobjex:develop and maybe a few others. I'm looking forward to your feedback and questions. Kind regards Juhan Aasaru
