Hi all,

as you may know we are working at migrating the build scripts of the OFBiz
trunk from Ant to Gradle.
Together with this important change we are also modifying, for policy
reasons, the way we distribute the external dependencies (i.e., the jar
files needed by OFBiz): the required jars will be downloaded at build time.
Since these changes are not bug fixes, the current plan is to do these
changes only in the trunk and do not backport them to the active branches,
that are currently:

* 13.07
* 14.12
* 15.12

However, we will still have to modify these branches by removing the
external jar files and download them using Ivy.

The first concern is that we will have to work on and stabilize two fronts:
Ivy for the 3 current release branches and Gradle for the trunk and the
future branches.
The second concern is that, as a consequence, we will have, for several
years, significant differences in the setup/build steps between the old
releases and the new ones that could cause confusion and regressions when
bugs are backported.

We have already issued 3 releases from the 13.07 branch and we have a
tentative plan to issue one more release around February 2017 that would be
the last release of this series.
As regards 14.12 and 15.12 branches, no releases have been issued yet.

Based on these details I would like you to consider the following decisions:

1) anticipate the end of life of the release branch 13.07 at now; we would
not issue the fourth release as initially planned
2) once stabilized, backport to 14.12 and 15.12 all the changes required to
build the system and download its dependencies with Gradle

Please express your opinion on each of them separately, since they are
independent (i.e., you could agree/disagree on the first/second/both).

Thanks,

Jacopo

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