Hi Folks,

Synapse binary distribution ships with some documentation (the docs
directory). In the previous releases, our build system was configured to
simply rename some of the Xdoc files into html files and include them in
the docs directory. In the new documentation, we have used the proper Xdoc
syntax to arrange and format the content. Therefore simply renaming the
Xdoc files to have a .html extension does not work anymore. Browsers do not
properly render the content.

So now we need to run the maven site plugin on the Xdoc files before the
distribution module is built. The output of the plugin should be packed
into the docs directory of the binary distribution. In the 2.1 branch we
made a few changes to get this working.

1. Included the maven site plugin in the build configuration of the root
pom and configured it to run in the install phase (this causes the site
plugin to run when executing 'mvn clean install')

2. The above change caused the API docs to get built too (before any of the
modules are built). And that had a serious impact on the build order of the
modules and we experienced many build breaks. So we removed the javadoc
plugin from the reporting configuration of the root pom and included that
too in the build configuration.

With these changes in place we now have the desired behavior. Properly
formatted and structured HTML content is packaged into the binary
distribution and war distribution of Synapse. However we need to run 'mvn
javadoc:javadoc' separately to build the API docs. Running 'mvn site:site'
will not build the API docs anymore.

I guess this is a very reasonable solution at the moment. However looking
into the future, is there a better way to solve this problem? Couple of
alternatives I can think of:

a. Not shipping the documentation with the binary distribution
b. Adding an ANT task to the distribution module pom to run mvn site:site
at the root level

WDYT?

Thanks
-- 
Hiranya Jayathilaka
Associate Technical Lead;
WSO2 Inc.;  http://wso2.org
E-mail: [email protected];  Mobile: +94 77 633 3491
Blog: http://techfeast-hiranya.blogspot.com

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