Hi, Today I had the opportunity to go have a look at a few of the build management tools. Theres some fantastic stuff going on right now with regards to this stuff. For those who are not aware theres a whole bunch of tools that will take a simple project.xml and do magic with it - ie the build tools take the descriptor and do the following sorts of things
* generate metrics * generate dependency analysis * generate website * generate semi-dynamic content for website (faqs from faq-o-matic, changelog from CVS, todo list from bugzilla, todo list from code, ...) * generate nice junit reports * upload websites to web servers * create template announcements for releases * create, sign, upload releases etc * generate ant build.xmls from project file * automatically download/update jars for users Anyways they all look like fantastic steps forward. Thus I think we should eventually move to one of them when they are matured. All of them are way to dynamic at the moment for using unless we were willing to constantly monitor them - which would be too big an investment IMHO. Another problem with each of these products is that they are very monolithic which makes it difficult to easily take part of the system without the rest which means they will probably tak a while to mature. So what to do in the meantime? Well for the meantime I say we stick with what we got. We can refactor out some commonalities into top-level build files (like the jdepend stuff) that don't need to be in each project file. Some things (like checkstyle) need to be in each projects build.xml so we can leave them there for the moment. Medium term we can move to using parts of gump descriptors as our project descriptors. The reason for this is that many of the different build systems use enhanced or transformed gump descriptors to do their magic. After that hopefully one of them will be mature enough for us to adopt. My personal favourite would be maven at this time - it is the best documented, close to what we need and easy to customize for our specifics. Unfortunately it is also the biggest in scope and will probably take the longest to mature. Thoughts on any of this? -- Cheers, Pete ----------------------------------------------- | If you turn on the light quickly enough, | | you can see what the dark looks like. | ----------------------------------------------- -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
