At 06:46 AM 3/22/2004, you wrote:
On Mar 22, 2004, at 7:28 AM, Joe Germuska wrote:
For me, the main discouraging thing about contributing to the development of Struts has been the build process. In the past, you had to download all of jakarta-commons and spend a day or two figuring out how to get that to build. Recently, I tried to build Struts and was successful using the Maven stuff. Personally, I don't mind using Maven, but I don't know that it should be *required* to build a project from scratch. I'd love to be able to cvs co Struts, navigate to jakarta-struts and type "ant jar".
I realize this is no easy thing to accomplish with a build file - but it has been the most discouraging factor for me. ;-)
The only way we could accomplish something like that with a build file would be by including JARs in CVS, and if you ask me, there are enough reasons why that's a bad idea that I prefer the way it is, even though I'd very much like to see people feel more comfortable getting in and working on Struts source code.
Right. I include my JARs in CVS and I've been doing it for quite some time with no issues. To be honest, there doesn't seem to be much difference in storing them in CVS vs. uploading them to a Maven repository. For me, it's often seemed easier to stick them in CVS. Of course, if I had managed to convert AppFuse to use Maven - maybe I wouldn't be so bitter. ;-)
I do like to be able to checkout my CVS-based project and disconnect and compile later though. No internet dependency is a good thing.
When you say "I don't know that [Maven] should be *required*..." is your point that Ant is a widely accepted Java tool, while Maven has yet to cut a 1.0 release? That's fair -- just want to make sure I understand you.
That's part of it - as well as Ant is easier to understand IMO. I use Maven on a couple projects, but I definitely prefer Ant - mainly b/c I have an Ant build.xml file that I use on all my projects.
The build.xml file generated by 'maven ant' uses the ant 'get' task and the Maven iBiblio repository to download dependencies; we could perhaps look at copying some of that into our ant script to reduce build.properties to being more about configuration stuff and less about dependency stuff.
Whatever it takes to make Struts easier to build. I guarantee that if you can build Struts with an ANT_HOME (or MAVEN_HOME) and JAVA_HOME set - and that's it - you'll get a lot more contributions.
My $.02.
Matt
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