Hey hey hey.
One of the big decisions that needs to be made relatively quickly is
what sort of build tool layout we want to have for the various components.
Sean and I have been discussing this topic I think for probably a month now but
never came to any firm decision. [This is particularly relevant to YETUS-2,
YETUS-6 and YETUS-15.] Let me see if I can summarize all of the highlights…
I’m sure Sean will add whatever I forgot. :)
* It’s extremely important that we be able to test Yetus with Yetus ASAP. (I
hope this is obvious… *smile*)
* Given our multi-lingual needs (Java, python, & bash as of today), different
components may need different build tools.
* Avro is a lesson of what happens when there are too many independent build
systems.
* Today, Yetus does not support multiple build tools in a single project easily
or perhaps at all. [That’s a future project. ;) ]
* One of the founding principals is to keep things as highly portable as
possible. This indicates ‘make’ or a common derivative (e.g., autoconf) as
highly desirable. Plus there is a good chance that the Yetus community at
large is going to be more familiar with make over every other tool.
* Recursive building is a huge …. but is an anti-pattern in make.
* Today, Yetus has support for ant, gradle, and maven, with maven support being
the strongest and gradle support being the weakest (things like checkstyle are
just flat out not supported yet). Adding support for make is on the list but
not there yet.
* Maven is likely to be the ‘fastest’ for us to bootstrap and be productive
with: annotations already has a pom, we already know how to do bats-based unit
testing for the bash code, mvn site support, recursion, etc, etc. But longer
term, it may not be the ‘best’ solution and the learning curve for folks is
particularly high. So there might be an (expensive) build tool switch later on.
* There is still the whole “what does a release artifact look like?” discussion
that will likely have an impact on the build tool. But that should be a
relatively minor concern. I hope.
* Who has the cycles to build the build bits anyway?
Anyone have any thoughts? Opinions? Thanks!
