Ralph Goers wrote:
No. We could take advantage of http://maven.apache.org/ant-tasks.html to
create various ant scripts to do that. However, since I'm still not
sure what this supposed support for non-maven builds really looks like
it is hard to have a good answer to the question.
Yes, that's the question du jour. Since I use Maven 2 in all of my Cocoon
projects, it's not easy for me to give an answer.
Looking at other projects, e.g. Spring might help us. Spring provides two
different downloads: One contains all Spring libraries, Javadocs and general
documentation, the second additionally includes all libraries Spring depends on.
Note that this releases don't contain any samples (at least the last time I
looked into it.)
The situation for Cocoon is similar but not the same. We've been working hard to
break up the monolith and make blocks more independant. A Cocoon block is more
like a Spring sub project (e.g. Spring webflow). In practise this means that you
can add those blocks to your Cocoon app that you need. In difference to 2.1 you
can make this decision at deployment time and not at build time.
Those independant blocks also have the advantage that establish different
release cycles for each: If we want to release e.g. the template block, we only
have to release this one without having to care for all the other stuff.
The first question we have to answer is, whether we want to pass this advantage
to non-Maven users too. If yes, each block also has to become a seperatly
downloadable release unit which could contain the block library itself,
Javadocs, general documentation and even the related samples block.
As an alternative we can create one huge download that contains the most recent
versions of Cocoon core 2.2, the latest versions of all releaseable blocks and a
preconfigured Jetty instance that is able to run Cocoon. The downside of this
approach is that this will create a really huge file (+50 megabytes) which will
not be very appealing for a beginner to start with.
- o -
My proposal is that we create seperate download units for Cocoon core and all
releaseable blocks. That's a bit of work intially but thanks to Maven we already
have all necessary parts. The work will "only" consist of writing a script
that pulls together all those parts (jar, sources, javadocs, general docs), zip
it, create checksums and sign it. The final result is a Maven free zip, the 2
checksums and the PGP singatures of all those files. This could become part of
the usual release process.
In addition I propose that we create a samples download (jetty + preconfigured
webapp) and a "getting-started" download which is derived from the output of our
Maven 2 archetypes. These two artefacts will always be created when Cocoon core
is released.
If we follow this proposal I would appreciate any help very much. The work
mainly consist of writing the scripts (I'd prefer Groovy or shell scripts).
On my personal todo list this comes right after setting up integration tests for
trunk (working on this right now) and writing an initial integration tests for
the servlet service framework. When all three things are done I'm ready for the
final release.
--
Reinhard Pötz Managing Director, {Indoqa} GmbH
http://www.indoqa.com/en/people/reinhard.poetz/
Member of the Apache Software Foundation
Apache Cocoon Committer, PMC member, PMC Chair [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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