Hi all, as the discussion had come up multiple times now … mainly on Slack, I would like to do a dedicated discussion here on the list about the topic.
Up to now we had built the build to generally build every module with maven, utilizing plugins to enable triggering builds with things like CMake. The maven build then took care of packing the results and handling the dependencies (At least this was how I built things for the C++ module) With the plc4net however we’re using an execution of “dotnet” to build a solution. In this case the build is entirely handled by dotnet and all maven does is trigger the build and fail if the execution fails with any non 0 return code. We are currently doing something similar with python: where we’re just calling python to execute the setup.py script. What is your opinion on how we should do our builds? If we go down the path like I initially setup C++, we have the benefit of utilizing the maven ecosystem and we will not have any problems during releases. It however comes with some comfort disadvantages for the “native” guys. But things like code-generation will work nicely. If we go down a non-maven path we will have to deal with all of this ourselves … we will have to come up with a way to handle everything ourselves Or learn how to do it in python and CMake and dotnet, and … The other thing is that we can’t integrate the driver generation as easy as with maven. Either we manually execute the code generation multiple times with maven to generate multiple output directories before executing the individual build system Or we have to build custom generators for every build-system we are using. Even if I like the way I setup the C++ build, I doubt all people will like it as it requires them to do things differently than they are used to. But I would strongly object implementing multiple code-generators. One option would be to split up the plc4x git repo into multiple repos – each one for one language … so we’d have a plc4j, plc4cpp, plc4net and plc4python. Each of these would be dedicated to one particular language and have build tools that fit them. However I strongly object this option, as it would require the Release manager to understand and setup each of these environments. Another option which I think would be a valid compromise, would be to have all languages in one repo the way we currently have it and Maven as triggering build system. The code is generated by maven but the build itself is handled by the particular build system. This will require people working exclusively in VisualStudio or some Python IDE, to manually run a “mvn generate-sources” first, but I think that’s a reasonable restriction. The benefit is that releasing this should be possible with our current release process which has a limited setup cost for the Release Manager. I would opt for the hybrid option with Maven as initiating build system for releases and code generation and CI stuff but to have the native build system for every language to build the individual parts. Namely this would be: * Plc4cpp: CMake * Plc4net: dotnet * Plc4Python: python setup.py Not quite sure how we can get the test-results to be reported correctly. What are your thoughts on this? Chris
