While replacing Ant with Gradle sounds like a good plan, I don't think it's a good idea to backport these changes. Seriously, when implementing OFBiz at a customer the only sane choice is to use a release branch (even if there is no release yet). The point of a release is to have a stable codebase, and porting the Gradle stuff (including changes in startup etc.) to the release branches will cause instability. Additionally, It will take quite some time before these changes will be done in trunk. Releasing 14.12 and 15.12 without the changes and then later doing a minor release with the changes would be bad.
My proposal is to release 14.12 ASAP, after that dropping 13.07 and then trying to do a release 16.x with Gradle. And a release of 15.12in between wouldn't be bad either ;) Christian Am 28.06.2016 12:26, schrieb Jacopo Cappellato: > Hi all, > > as you may know we are working at migrating the build scripts of the OFBiz > trunk from Ant to Gradle. > Together with this important change we are also modifying, for policy > reasons, the way we distribute the external dependencies (i.e., the jar > files needed by OFBiz): the required jars will be downloaded at build time. > Since these changes are not bug fixes, the current plan is to do these > changes only in the trunk and do not backport them to the active branches, > that are currently: > > * 13.07 > * 14.12 > * 15.12 > > However, we will still have to modify these branches by removing the > external jar files and download them using Ivy. > > The first concern is that we will have to work on and stabilize two fronts: > Ivy for the 3 current release branches and Gradle for the trunk and the > future branches. > The second concern is that, as a consequence, we will have, for several > years, significant differences in the setup/build steps between the old > releases and the new ones that could cause confusion and regressions when > bugs are backported. > > We have already issued 3 releases from the 13.07 branch and we have a > tentative plan to issue one more release around February 2017 that would be > the last release of this series. > As regards 14.12 and 15.12 branches, no releases have been issued yet. > > Based on these details I would like you to consider the following decisions: > > 1) anticipate the end of life of the release branch 13.07 at now; we would > not issue the fourth release as initially planned > 2) once stabilized, backport to 14.12 and 15.12 all the changes required to > build the system and download its dependencies with Gradle > > Please express your opinion on each of them separately, since they are > independent (i.e., you could agree/disagree on the first/second/both). > > Thanks, > > Jacopo >
