Glenn Nielson wrote:
>
> What is GUMP, and what service does it provide for the jakarta-taglibs project?
Gump is an initiative I started late last year to provide early warning of
version incompatibilities that will affect various Java projects,
particularly those under the Jakarta and xml.apache.org umbrellas.
As taglibs have a lot of external dependencies, I would think that it would
be difficult to monitor each, so a service which provides early
notification would be of great value. But that's just me. What do you
think?
Note: in many cases, the breaking API change was unintentional; in many
others I have convinced the owner of the API to merely deprecate the old
interface instead of removing it right away.
> GUMP does a verification that jakarta projects build, but doesn't honor their
> API version dependencies? Isn't that a bit draconian? Is this something
> you decided, or is this a position of the Jakarta PMC?
Gump does a verification that the jakarta projects build with the latest
versions of their dependencies.
This is an initiative I have undertaken. Every member of the PMC is aware
of this, and many have encouraged me to be *MORE* draconian, but I have
elected to be a bit more reserved. In this case, I only started alerting
on Xalan1 dependencies at the point when Xalan1 is going out of service.
Note: I personally have a serious problem with each project independently
making version dependency choices, as all too often the end result is that
it simply is not possible to deploy a solution containing multiple Jakarta
projects.
> Perhaps verifying that jakarta projects build and policing use of deprecated
> API's should be separate things.
Gump does the verification against deprecated APIs. Much as I dislike the
notion of a project having an strong dependency on an specific version of
another product, if someone wants to verify that dependency, they certainly
are free to do so - separately.
> Posting a long GUMP build failure to tablibs-dev every day due to GUMP not
> honoring API dependicies doesn't solve anything, and when it fails doesn't
> finish verifying the normal jakarta-taglibs build process.
Let me try once again. Gump does a verification of taglibs-dev against the
latest version of its dependencies. As an extreme example, it actually
builds jakarta-ant from source and then uses that version to build the
remainder of the projects. Since I have started doing this, the number of
incompatible changes to Ant has dropped to essentially zero.
I can provide innumerable recent examples where this notification has
resulted in the change in one or both of the projects involved.
Again, verifying the "normal" jakarta-taglibs build process is, as you
suggest, a separate thing.
> (Not the author of jakarta-taglibs/xtags)
IMHO, if you can't find a maintainer for xtags, it should be removed. If
it is maintained, it should not depend on things which are out of service.
- Sam Ruby
