+1 to move to Gradle. I think the biggest benefit of moving to Gradle is that it will lead to more contributions.
People will no longer have to fight to get the code to import into an IDE (i.e. IntelliJ), compile and successfully run tests. I've just got a new laptop and it took me too long to get JMeter just to import and compile in IntelliJ, there were at least 5 different, non-standard steps to get it to work. One of them was manually including JavaFx as it's no longer part of OpenJDK and not download as part of ant download_jars. The other benefit is that it should improve the speed at which we can build, test and therefore make changes. I think, regardless if we move to Gradle, that a few people with a good knowledge of ant and our current build.xml should make it easier to understand and optimise it: 1. comment anything which might not be obvious to someone new to ant and 2. remove (or simplify) anything which is no longer required We could switch JMeter to Gradle right now by using https://docs.gradle.org/current/userguide/ant.html e.g. using a build.gradle file with ant.importBuild("build.xml") ant.lifecycleLogLevel = AntBuilder.AntMessagePriority.INFO Then start to move the actions into the Gradle file, although it seems things are too interconnected for this to be an easy job. A separate release script like Kafka is a very good idea. It doesn't bloat the build file and encourages automation and even simplification of the important release process. Thanks Graham On Sat, 23 Feb 2019, 03:25 Vladimir Sitnikov, <sitnikov.vladi...@gmail.com> wrote: > Apache Kafka might be relevant for the inspiration. > They somehow release Apache-compatible artifacts, and they use Git, Gradle. > > https://github.com/apache/kafka > https://github.com/apache/kafka/blob/trunk/release.py > > Vladimir >
