On Sun, May 14, 2023 at 10:37 AM Gary Gregory <garydgreg...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Tangent: We should enable GitHub Actions builds to build the master branch > and PRs, this will avoid merging broken PRs. This failure could be my fault > since I did not run local builds before merging the recent PR. Switching our > build to Maven will make this much easier. I personally would not bother > getting GH builds working with our current Ant builds since failure detection > seems to require eyeballing console output. I would go as far as suggesting > that switching to Maven should be job one. >
Strongly disagree. Job 0: Pushing a functional release to Maven Central Job 1: getting everything into a single Github repo Job 2: Making the Ant build work Job 3: making the test suite pass Job 4: documenting the build process Job 5: setting up CI ...many, many bugs... Job 287: Migrating build to Maven A maven build is a time sink that might never happen. I've tried porting other projects from ant to Maven that were far less complex than Xalan, and given up because it just wasn't worth it. Taking on big restructuring projects as a prerequisite to making smaller, incremental improvements that deliver value now is a common antipattern on software development teams. I've only rarely seen it succeed at all, as in eventually development continues after a long pause. I've never seen it be worth the time and effort expended. A Maven build offers no value to end users. For developers it's perhaps somewhat easier than ant, but hardly a panacea and will not fix most of the problems with Xalan Java development. The real problem is that Xalan is currently in a nearly unbuildable, untestable state that can only be released with heroic efforts and lots of error prone manual steps. IMHO it has not been successfully released for ~9 years. The 2.7.3 release is broken and unusable without more manual effort by each project to patch the pom.xml. I could start fixing some of this but not with the project in its current state. A Maven build with multiple repos, failing tests, and no development instructions or consensus on basic issues like how one submits and merges a PR would not help me or anyone else to contribute. -- Elliotte Rusty Harold elh...@ibiblio.org --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@xalan.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@xalan.apache.org
