Re: buildr usability

[Mat Schaffer]

I don't think the JVM startup is that much of an issue especially considering that we're comparing buildr to ant and maven which also incur similar start-up delays. +1 for a simple unzip-and-run installation.

-Mat

On Oct 20, 2009, at 9:41 AM, Daniel Spiewak wrote:

This is a really great idea! I'm actually surprised that none of us thought of this earlier. JRuby is very easy to distribute in a self- contained fashion, so this sort of packaging is not only possible but very natural. The only disadvantage would be the performance hit carried by JRuby and really the JVM's slow startup. I think this is probably palletable though, especially given the convenience of this approach.

Daniel

On Oct 20, 2009, at 7:47 AM, "Ittay Dror" <ittay.d...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi,



being able to quickly start using buildr.


My experience is that BuildR is great for me as a build developer. It
allows me to do in several lines of code things that would take a lot
more in Ant and that I probably wouldn't even try with Maven.



code, the procedure to start working with BuildR is just an obstacle

or Ant, it is something new to install.


Right now, I have 3 people trying to use BuildR without success. The

from source (not a smooth experience for a java developer coming from
windows). After compiling and installing, trying to upload, he got an

the time of compilation he didn't have libssl-dev installed. So he

install it. This was a long, un-Java process to go through...



on Mac. RJB could not find the ruby headers. We couldn't resolve this
issue, so they needed to resort to using another machine (!)


Of course there's the choice of using JRuby. However, It will still
require multiple steps (installing jruby then buildr) and I'm sure it
will have its own issues.


What it boils down to is bad first impression with BuildR.

I want to suggest that BuildR will be provided as a self-contained
package. It could be jruby with all gems that can be extracted some

.tar.gz of binaries), which will help performance when running the
builds. An additional feature is proper inspection of the environment
before running (something like 'require 'openssl' rescue puts "please
make sure you have openssl installed, on linux install libssl and on
mac...").

Regards,
Ittay

P.s., I can try to accomplish this if the idea sounds good.

Regarding the next buildr version, I think the biggest issue should be However, when it comes to other developers that just want to compile the they need to go through. And given that it is not as standard as Maven first uses linux and so installed the ruby package but had segmentation faults with java 1.6 (which we must use), so he needed to compile ruby error about not being able to require openssl. Now, 'require' is not a known term to a java developer... the reason for the error was that at needed to install it, re-generate the Makefile for ext/openssl and then Two other users had issues because they couldn't get BuildR to install placed and used, but optimally, it will also be packages per OS (can be

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