I'm not part of the contributor team, so I can't speak for the Groovy
team, but I would strongly disagree with you. If you use Maven or
Gradle, it's easy to maintain dependencies on particular versions of jar
files, and have your IDE immediately pick up the new version. In fact,
the default behavior for both Maven and Gradle is to explicitly maintain
version numbers in artifacts. Removing this would be a step back to the
90s. Sometimes jar files have to copied into other directories outside
of their normal home. An example is when deploying Tomcat. Stuff like
jdbc drivers etc typically get copied into $CATALINA_BASE/lib. It's
worth gold to immediately be able to tell which particular version of
those jar files are in there, vs just seeing "foobar.jar".
I would argue that you should probably change the practice of creating
symlinks to explicitly versioned jar files as this is obviously a pain
when new versions are introduced.
Just my $0.02.
-H
On 7/28/15 5:26 AM, Steve Amerige wrote:
Hi all,
Every time we take a download of the latest Groovy software, we have
to do the same task: remove version numbers from file names. As of the
2.4.4 release, there are 39 files, shown below, that have the version
number as part of the distribution. So, why is this a problem?
* IDEs cannot silently be updated to use a mandated Groovy version.
With 2.4.4 dealing with a zero-day vulnerability issue, we want to
push this out. However, the version numbers in files mean that
users must participate in the updating. This is not desirable.
* Links that users might have at the OS level are broken with each
new release.
* Version numbers in files makes it more difficult to diff between
releases.
* Version numbers as a part of a filename is a specific case of
metadata as part of file names and, as such, we consider it to be
a bad practice. This information is better kept in a file,
preferably machine readable in a format such as JSON or XML, or in
manifest files that can be consumed by software that might do
version number validation as part of security efforts in
maintaining code.
It is reasonable that the root directory include a version number.
But, under that directory, we'd expect that the contents are
version-less. A good example of a version-less Apache project is the
HTTP Server <http://httpd.apache.org/download.cgi>. The download is
presently a file named *httpd-2.4.16.tar.gz*, and when extracted
produces a top-level directory named *httpd-2.4.16*. No file name
contains the version number string. The two files *CHANGES *and
*httpd.spec *contain the version number string. I believe that Groovy
should follow this example, and possibly go one step better by having
an explicit manifest file with all pertinent metadata for the Groovy
release that includes metadata such as the version number, license
name, checksums of files (for security checking), etc.
If you agree, how can we start the process of making this change?
Thanks,
Steve Amerige
Principal Software Developer, Fraud and Compliance Solutions Development
SAS Institute, 100 SAS Campus Dr, Room U3050, Cary, NC 27513-8617
./lib/groovy-sql-2.4.4.jar
./lib/groovy-testng-2.4.4.jar
./lib/groovy-jsr223-2.4.4.jar
./lib/groovy-servlet-2.4.4.jar
./lib/groovy-json-2.4.4.jar
./lib/groovy-jmx-2.4.4.jar
./lib/groovy-test-2.4.4.jar
./lib/groovy-bsf-2.4.4.jar
./lib/groovy-groovydoc-2.4.4.jar
./lib/groovy-nio-2.4.4.jar
./lib/groovy-console-2.4.4.jar
./lib/groovy-xml-2.4.4.jar
./lib/groovy-ant-2.4.4.jar
./lib/groovy-docgenerator-2.4.4.jar
./lib/groovy-groovysh-2.4.4.jar
./lib/groovy-templates-2.4.4.jar
./lib/groovy-swing-2.4.4.jar
./lib/groovy-2.4.4.jar
./apache-groovy-src-2.4.4-incubating.zip
./embeddable/groovy-all-2.4.4-indy.jar
./embeddable/groovy-all-2.4.4.jar
./indy/groovy-json-2.4.4-indy.jar
./indy/groovy-console-2.4.4-indy.jar
./indy/groovy-2.4.4-indy.jar
./indy/groovy-sql-2.4.4-indy.jar
./indy/groovy-jmx-2.4.4-indy.jar
./indy/groovy-servlet-2.4.4-indy.jar
./indy/groovy-xml-2.4.4-indy.jar
./indy/groovy-swing-2.4.4-indy.jar
./indy/groovy-templates-2.4.4-indy.jar
./indy/groovy-ant-2.4.4-indy.jar
./indy/groovy-groovydoc-2.4.4-indy.jar
./indy/groovy-nio-2.4.4-indy.jar
./indy/groovy-test-2.4.4-indy.jar
./indy/groovy-testng-2.4.4-indy.jar
./indy/groovy-groovysh-2.4.4-indy.jar
./indy/groovy-docgenerator-2.4.4-indy.jar
./indy/groovy-bsf-2.4.4-indy.jar
./indy/groovy-jsr223-2.4.4-indy.jar
