On 5/15/07, Kevin Stembridge <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Hi all (and Jerome in particular), I recently submitted a patch to enable the addition of a version attribute in each jar resource element declared in the generated JNLP file. I needed this to enable incremental updates when using the JnlpDownloadServlet. I've been getting a better understanding of how these incremental updates work and it looks like a bit more work will be required on the plugin. First of all, the version number needs to be stripped from the file name used in the href attribute when a version attribute is provided. Second, we need to be able to bundle multiple versions of the same dependency in the zip artifact produced by the plugin. This is to enable a jardiff to be generated for the differences between the version of the jar on the client and the latest version declared in the JNLP. I haven't given this much thought yet, but the first thing that came to mind was that the way a jnlp project currently declares dependencies won't work. Maybe we could use the dependency plugin to collate the required jar files into a working directory from which they can then be signed and compressed. Any thoughts?
Kevin, I've given even less thoughts to the problem than you :) In particular because I don't use the incremental updates feature of the JnlpDownload servlet. My first impression is that this is a somewhat complex feature and I am not sure how many users need it. Second I already think that the jnlp plugin does a little bit too much. I don't want it to become the plugin that does everything in a bad way. So I am not sure how bundling old releases should happen. Should a mojo pick all old releases automatically from a repository ? Should the user have control over that ? Stripping version number is OK. Maybe we should split the mojo into various activities: * generate jnlp file * assemble zip file * repackage zip files with old versions Not sure how this would be practical for the user.. I don't intend to spent much time solving the problem but I can comment proposed solutions. As a first jot I would suggest to separate the rebundling of the zip with older releases in a separate mojo. We can see of merging that feature later on when one has more experience with JNLP incremental updates. How does that sound ? Cheers, Jerome --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe from this list please visit: http://xircles.codehaus.org/manage_email
