On Fri, 29 Mar 2002, Danny Angus wrote: > Morning, > > I wrote: > > > I'm not qualified to put forward any suggestions >
That doesnt stop most people, including myself from replying ;) > Sam replied: > > I respectfully disagree. > > Thanks Sam, I'll now bore you with my own opinion, and see if you change > your mind.. ;-) > > I believe that there are two conflicting forces at work within Jakarta > regarding cross sub-project dependancies, > > The first is the desire of individual sub-projects to provide their general > users (the people who make the sub-projects' existence worthwhile) with a > single distributable file from which a full working install can be made. > James and Turbine(which has a version including tomcat) are examples of > this. This gets positive feedback from users who want a shallow learning > curve and a fast track to deploying the application. > We are going to try to aim for the single distributable file for periodicity, which should have a 0.0.1 release soon. For projects like turbine and James where you can literally lose users in five minutes if they get too frustrated this makes sense. > The second is the worthy and intelligent notion (exemplified by GUMP) that > no cross project dependancies should be satisfied by an individual > sub-project. > This is based on the notion that to do so will inevitably lead people who > are installing more than one sub-project to have to maintain duplicates of > some API's that are depended upon (is there a word for that?) by more than > one sub-project, logging and ant for instance. Tomcat source distributions > are an (admittedly poor) example of this in that they don't distribute ant, > but the build depends upon it, there may be better examples. > I think that there is a growing trend among some projects to have test suites using JUnit. Perhaps there will come a day when Gump could automatically build every project AND run all the tests associated with every project. This could be done by having components that support tests defining a well-known Test that would call all tests for that component. Kind of like knowing http is port 80. Gump could run the well-known junit test automatically. If enough Apache projects used JUnit tests then Gump would not only be able to tell us if a build is broke but also if functionality has been affected... I know I am a dreamer, but it could happen. The only thing for developers in all the sub-projects to do is agree on the name of the well-known test and implement a JUnit test suite with that name and we would all be one step closer to ending jar hell... > I don't know how this helps to clarify the situation, but I expect a > "Jakarta registry" is probably required, and the ability for sub-projects to > define their classpaths as part of their installation procedure. In which > case a manifest reading ant task could ensure dependancies are satisfied > without sub-projects having to bundle them. > <snip> Thanks Jeff Prickett -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
