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The thing is that Ant 1.6 as promissing as it sounds is not released yet. If we keep the same build system, thats fine. However, I would prefer we do this with something we can expect to find *installed* on a developer's machine.
Cocoon comes with its own Ant - there's no need for an installed Ant on
the developer's machine. So if we decide to use Ant 1.6 the user will
get it automatically.
But that only covers sources located inside the cocoon source tree. What about developers that want to create their own blocks? As it is now the only way to do that is to put them into the cocoon source tree, edit the Gump descriptor, etc. How would you achieve that these third party blocks to be project managed in any acceptable way - such as putting them into some CVS module of their own or at least away from the cocoon source tree - ? Somehow there needs to be some kind of plugin or ant add-on that will also work without having to invoke cocoons specific build script. Or maybe you imply to say that any machine you wish to develop a cocoon block on be outfitted with an installed cocoon instance just to build the project?
The way I have been able to develop seperate blocks has been to create a custom Maven plugin that simulates some of the tasks that are defined in the cocoon block build system, such as patching configuration files and sitemaps, copying resources, etc. Surely this is something that cocoon lacks atm.
This is only with 2.1 "fake blocks". The 2.2 "real blocks" we're gearing up for are sealed binary units, deployable without a build or reconfiguration of Cocoon. There is one step, the block manager deploy process only necessary to specify deploy specific config values and resolving of dependencies. They are the "solution to all our problems and the answer to all our dreams" (quote from favorite movie and if anyone can guess it you'll be my new best friend).
If you havn't read up on the blocks docs on the wiki lately (the last two weeks) you really should. Stefano has put a good series of pages up detailing the plan and the current implementation ideas.
Geoff
