On Tue, Oct 6, 2015 at 2:03 AM, Florent Daigniere < nextg...@freenetproject.org> wrote: > > > Dependency management, and more importantly, Maven (and more recently > > Gradle) have become pretty-much industry standards, almost no new > > Java > > project uses Ant. If we want to attract new contributors, the fact > > that we > > have an outdated build system will be a turn-off for them. > > You can push further and ask, are there new projects written in java? > And the answer is very likely no; that's not what the cool kids are > doing nowadays.
Java is one of the world's most popular programming languages. There are plenty of new projects being written in Java. Every single Android app for starters. And I don't advocate using Gradle because it's what the "cool kids" use, but because it simplifies things for developers, particularly getting things set up initially. > Don't get me wrong, I'm all for modernizing the build system... I just > doubt that it should be the priority of the few people who still > contribute. Perhaps if it weren't for the outdated build system we would have more than a few people still contributing. > We all know Ant well enough to build freenet as is. I'm not concerned about people who are already comfortable with the existing build system, I'm concerned about future contributors. > We've reached the stage where we hardly have the resources to merge > what's contributed (out of the three examples you've picked, we had two > of them on non-merged branches - the website and travis configs)... > That goes to show how resource bound we currently are. Changing the > build system is even more involved... as it entails updating the > release scripts (that should also be gradle-ified). > All the more reason to do what we can to make it easier for new contributors to contribute. Ian. _______________________________________________ Devl mailing list Devl@freenetproject.org https://emu.freenetproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/devl
