> Job 0: Pushing a functional release to Maven Central > Job 1: getting everything into a single Github repo
+1. That is indeed biting the users. > Job 287: Migrating build to Maven Elliotte, the current "source" release for Xalan contains **a lot** of compiled binaries in the source package. According to https://www.apache.org/legal/release-policy.html#source-packages, a release SHOULD not contain compiled code. At the same time, it says "binary/bytecode MUST only add binary/bytecode files that are the result of compiling that version of the source code release and its dependencies". In other words, it sounds like a strong violation of the ASF release policy which should have high priority for fixing. I think the PMC members should decide the way they address that issue (e.g. fix it or ignore it), however, if they feel the most promising approach is migrating to Maven, then who cares? Apparently, dealing with external dependencies is much easier in Maven than in Ant. Taking into account that Xalan is quite a small project, it might be easier to just create a new Maven or Gradle-based build than spend time on reviving Ant-based one. For the users, it is important to be able to customize Xalan (e.g. build from sources), and the current build scripts do not help with achieving that. At the end of the day, Maven and Gradle-based builds are much more convenient for contributors. For instance, I would expect that IDEs should open the code with no extra hints, it should download dependencies automatically, should allow running tests, and so on. In other words, I would agree with Gary that it is not worth spending time on reviving Ant-based build. However, I would not object if somebody spends their time on working on Ant build. However, I still think that even after "reviving Ant-based build", it would still be hard to use within IDEs. --- > Job 4: documenting the build process > Job 5: setting up CI I would say "setting up CI" is more important for contributors and for the users than "documenting the build process". A workable CI is better than documentation because nobody knows if the documentation is up-to-date or not. At the same time, I believe the build instructions should be something like "./mvnw clean install" or "./graldew build". It should not require complicated configuration steps in order to build and test. ---- Gary is a committer and Gary is a part of PMC for Xalan, so when Gary says something like "forget about the current Ant, and migrate to Maven" that is completely understandable and it is fine provided somebody would perform such a migration. Just wondering, Gary, would you please clarify if you are willing to work on migrating to Maven? Would you kindly estimate the amount of time it might take? Don't get me wrong. No way I put deadlines or whatever here. I truly want to know if you are planning to work on that or if you are waiting for somebody to pick the task. Just in case you wonder, I would not spend my time migrating Xalan to Maven, however, I would happily help with creating Gradle-based build scripts for Xalan. Vladimir
