As you should all know by now, I've been on a hard sprint most of this
week to get a reasonable-looking Surefire 2.4 out the door. I think we're
basically where I want it to be.
Just three main areas remain.
1) useSystemClassLoader issues
2) Snapshot dependencies
3) Measuring code coverage
and finally a remark 4) Dan takes a breather
1) useSystemClassLoader issues
Notably a lot of the very trickiest Surefire bugs we've gotten have all
been "Not Reproducible" or "Won't Fix", because all you have to do is set
useSystemClassLoader=true and things "just work." I'd love to make that
the default setting for Surefire, but there's some stuff in the way that
worries me about doing that.
SUREFIRE-334 (targeted for 2.3.1) points out that we're depending on a
good chunk of plexus stuff in Surefire, and that this would infect the AUT
if we just set useSystemClassLoader=true. 332 and 347 are probably dupes
of this issue, but these things are subtle so I haven't closed them yet.
Jason suggested that we might use the maven-shade-plugin to shade our
plexus dependencies (repackaging them in different package names and
updating dependencies); it's a good idea, but maven-shade-plugin fails to
work properly on the plexus archiver (it doesn't translate interfaces
correctly, apparently?).
It would be great to resolve this issue and make useSystemClassLoader the
default BEFORE 2.4 ships (it *is* targeted for 2.3.1). I think Brett has
claimed these. (The other 2.3.1 bug 335 is a weird one, suggesting that
we might somehow useSystemClassLoader without forking; that sounds like
nonsense to me and I'd be curious to hear someone [Brett] comment on it.)
2) Snapshot dependencies (SUREFIRE-394)
2.4 depends on plexus-utils 1.4.8-SNAPSHOT; it should be released before
we release Surefire 2.4.
Up until last week or so we used to depend on plexus-archiver
alpha-10-SNAPSHOT, but that created ICCEs (see SUREFIRE-389) and so I
downgraded to alpha-7. If we DO need alpha-10-SNAPSHOT, then we'll need to
figure out the dependency issue (perhaps by fixing SUREFIRE-334 and
applying maven-shade-plugin?). jdcasey apparently knew why we needed
alpha-10, but I still don't; my integration tests are all passing without
it.
3) Measuring code coverage
I wrote all these tests! How good are they? Measuring the coverage of
out-of-proc integration tests seems to be pretty tricky, though not
impossible. Any ideas?
4) Dan takes a breather
I've been focused on getting this far all week, but I'll be basically
useless for most of the next week, maybe two. I'll try to be available to
answer e-mail and chat, but this next week I won't be doing a lot of
coding.
I'd appreciate it if somebody non-me were to take up the baton and help
get this release out sometime this week (we're so close)! :-)
OK, that's it. Let me know if you have questions. I'm off to bed!
-Dan
