I had my first experience with the full Hibernate build this morning, including the build of the HibernateExt and Tools modules.
I thought things were....well....yucky ;)
I have a firm belief in leaving out jar files in a cvs repository, as that is not source code, and dependencies change frequently. IMHO, it is far better to use the $APPNAME_HOME approach when using dependencies, and having the ant script dynamically check environment variables to see if the required dependencies are installed on a system. If not, you could even have the script pull them from a common repository (e.g. Maven's Ibiblio repository).
Also, a hierarchical build appraoch using a single CVS module would be much nicer. E.G. using a master build script that you act upon regularly. Then one could call "ant tools" or "ant extensions" or "ant core" to build the respective modules. Perhaps an "ant suite" target builds everything for a common distribution of all modules for the average every day user.
I further believe the there should be a "binary only" distribution of Hibernate (including all of its tools) as a "Hibernate Suite" distribution that includes docs, api, etc, but without any source files, build scripts, or irregular build directories. This would be for the average every day Hibernate user who needs it on their system.
Also, I don't think it is important to separate the tools classes from the Hibernate core classes, as they are probably more frequently used together than apart. (e.g. the CodeGenerator in the tools distribution, I would argue, is a core feature of Hibernate). The separation of the two sets causes more confusion then assistance, in my opinion. Of course, the Hibern8IDE, could be considered a seperate product, but could still be distributed in the Hibernate "Suite" version.
Finally, it might be a good idea to have a hibernate.jar file that includes all compiled class files needed for hibernate to execute, except any dependencies. Dependency class files could be in a hibernate-dep.jar file.
I'm not sure if this would be a useful approach, but it _is_ a big pain to have to look in 4 directories just to set up a hibernate classpath...($HIBERNATE_HOME, $HIBERNATE_HOME/lib, $HIBERNATE_TOOLS_HOME, $HIBERNATE_TOOLS_HOME/lib).
Thoughts, comments, suggestions, hate mail? ;)
Les
P.S. If no one objects, I'd like to put together a hierarchical ant build sometime this weekend (family in town, so I can't do much until then) and show you what I'm talking about.
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