Hi all, as I have heard complaints that the current way we handle profiles is too complicated, I would like to discuss alternatives with you all.
Currently if you just run “./mvnw install” it will only build the protocols. This is probably not what the user wants. Right now we didn’t want to overwhelm someone just wanting to build Java, which will probably be the most common case to configure all the prerequisites for C++ and C#. So we introduced the “with-xyz” profiles. Now you only need to provide the tooling needed for the parts you want to build, which reduces the entry barrier (in my opinion) On the other hand we didn’t want people working on C++ and C# to have to run the Java test-suite before committing. But it seems that having to enable profiles already raises the barrier too high and people get confused instead of relieved. This was not planned and therefore we need to react. Yesterday I did a little brainstorming to what options I could think of … perhaps you have others or you have feedback to them. Your opinion would be highly appreciated: 1. If no “with-xyz” profile is activated, a message is output which tells the user it should enable a profile (This should be very simple to implement) 2. We make the “with-java” profile “enabled by default” (if no profile is enabled, this one is automatically enabled, making the naïve developer just trying “mvn package” scceed) 3. We remove all profiles and ask people to go into “plc4j” to build the java part, into “sandbox” if they want to build the sandbox (We could add the suggestion to use “-am” to the build which will “also build” any outside modules needed by the current selection) Here my thoughts to the approaches: 1. This shouldn’t have any negative side-effects (I personally would prefer this … we could even try make it “interactive” where the user can select the options he wants enabled and it generates a “command line” the user can use to build what he wants) 2. The problem with enabled by default profiles is that they get disabled if a profile is explicitly selected. So if a user builds “mvn package” it would build java. But if he runs “mvn -Pwith-cpp package” it would only build C++ and no longer java … if you want java and C++ you would need to do “mvn -Pwith-java,with-cpp package” (Not that intuitive, I think … but an option) 3. This will cause the “mvn package” type of persons to be flooded with a list of things to install and the build will take pretty long. As they will probably always have some prerequisite not installed and the build will not start with an explanation on why, we could use this opportunity to also point out that you don’t have to install all prerequisites if you only want to build part of the project. In this case too we would have to split the prerequisite check to the individual submodules or people will be left without guidance when building only “plc4cpp” for example … so we would have the big check in the root and multiple partial checks in the sub-directories. I personally would prefer the version 1), but let’s discuss this. Perhaps you have other ideas … I would be happy to hear and discuss them. Chris
