Le Mardi, 30 sep 2003, à 14:43 Europe/Zurich, Berin Loritsch a écrit :
...Things like ANT should be installed like the tool that it is...
I see your point, but IMHO the big advantage with including ANT is that the only requirement on the users is to install a JDK.
We are talking about professional people here. Developers. Hopefully, if they are planning on building Cocoon, they would know enough on how to install ANT. How much hand-holding do we want to do?
For developer's, there should be only a little bit. I.e. a BUILDING.txt or something like that to explain the steps involved should be enough for a developer. We aren't talking average users here. Average users should use released builds.
As we're currently distributing Cocoon in source code, requiring users to install the correct version of ant would certainly increase the traffic on the users list with al sorts of mysterious problems, duplicate ant setups where you get the wrong version in the path, etc.
So you are asking users to build Cocoon? -1. You are asking for trouble. Try binary releases for users, leaving source code for people who have a clue what to do with it.
In projects where I'm working we do it slightly differently, we have a parallel CVS module for tools, shared between projects, with directory names including version numbers, and the build.sh script accesses the appropriate version of the tool with relative paths like
../cvs-tools-sandbox/ant/1.5.1
With avoids heavy duplication of tools yet allows each project to use the "right" version of a tool.
Still -1. While this can be a "special" issue, ANT 1.6 should be backwards compatible with ANT 1.5.1. I know that 1.5.4 is. They have a number of test cases to verify that.
What you are doing is duplicating the tools--no way around that. One install per machine should work. I have not run into any issues with that.
--
"They that give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety
deserve neither liberty nor safety."
- Benjamin Franklin