Re: State of maven build system, gradle and Apache commens

["Björn Höfling" <bjoern.hoefling@bjoernhoefling.de>]

Hi Hartmut and Ricardo,

On Thu, 1 Sep 2016 14:03:10 +0200
Ricardo Wurmus <ricardo.wurmus@mdc-berlin.de> wrote:

> 
> Hartmut Goebel <h.goebel@goebel-consult.de> writes:
> 
> > is anyone working on this? (I'm lacking knowledge to help with maven
> > or gradle, but could help with commons.)
> 
> We are still a long way off before get to a working maven build
> system. I have a few more Java packages sitting here, but it’s not
> much.
> 
> We first need to recursively package all dependencies of Maven.  The
> next packages on my list are “java-javax-mail” (done) and
> “java-log4j-core”, which needs the following packages:
> 
>     javax-persistence
>     javax-jms
>     java-zeromq
>     kafka
>     apache-commons
> 
> These might have unpackaged dependencies of their own.  If you took
> over “apache-commons” that would be very helpful.  You should be able
> to use the “ant-build-system” to get started, even if it doesn’t
> result in the prettiest packages.
> 
> Once we actually have Maven packaged (completely from source without
> cheating) we should take a look at the existing packages again and see
> if we should install jars with a directory layout that Maven expects.
> Until then I wouldn’t bother trying to anticipate all these issues.

I'm interested in which version of maven do you start to create? Which
version(s) of the dependencies/plugins are you rebuilding?

Here is my experience so far: Last month I started looking at the maven
build-process too. I know that it wouldn't be that easy, but it's
harder than expected.

First, I asked on maven-devel [0], but I had the feeling they don't
understand the philosophy behind working with source dependencies
instead of binary ones.

Then I looked for myself at different versions of Maven and decided to
go with version 1.1 and bootstrap me up. But even this has hard and
funny dependencies:

For example, dom4j-1.7-20060614.jar has in it's META-INF written:
"*Note* that this is a custom-built version for the Maven project. It
was built from dom4j cvs trunk as of 2006-06-08 with the branch
DOM4J_1_X_BRANCH merged in."

OK, the branch is still there on SourceForge, but can I really be sure
to get the source code they used to build the jar-file? Or is that
ultimately lost in Java/Apache history?

Next, dom4j and others use forehead-1.0-beta-5.jar. The original
project is no longer there. Luckily I found a copy on a Gentoo mirror
[1].

Other dependencies, even relatively old ones need Maven in order to
compile (at least they use Maven originally, maybe it's possible to
build them with some Ant task too). That is the case for
commons-jelly/1.0.1-20060717, which by the way is again a patched
version ("*Note* that this is a custom-built version for the Maven
project. It was built from svn trunk as of 2006-07-17 (r 422982) but
with the fixes for JELLY-213 and JELLY-214 reverted").

How do you proceed? Do you have an issue raised where we can share
knowledge/coordinate next steps?

Björn


[0] https://www.mail-archive.com/dev@maven.apache.org/msg110304.html
(Post from Björn Höfling at Mon, 22 Aug 2016 23:26:10 -0700 on dev at
maven dot apache dot org)

[1] http://ftp.fi.debian.org/gentoo/distfiles/forehead-1.0_beta5.tbz2