Re: Upgrade to 9 questions

On 2/10/2010 12:58 PM, Oliver Jowett wrote:
> Albert Kurucz wrote:
>> Why source files are not release after preprocessing?
>
> Because the substitutions that are needed are different depending on
> your build environment e.g. which JDBC version and JDK you are building
> for. The ant buildfile handles both detecting your build environment and
> performing suitable substitutions. Releasing multiple source
> distributions, each of which only works for one environment, where the
> only difference is in the 3-4 templated files - that'd be confusing and
> unnecessary when the build process already handles it, don't you think?

It would be pretty nice to generate source archives alongside the jars,
though I think putting them on the website would be somewhat excessive.
I'd mostly want the source jars to provide convenient debugging in
Netbeans, especially with Maven where it automagically finds the source
jars if they're there.

>> Java source files please for the non Ant users!
>
> I don't think we really support building the driver except via ant, it
> is something of a de-facto standard for building Java these days. (Ok,
> now the Maven people are going to yell at me ;-))

Consider yourself yelled at :-P

No, truly, there are things Ant's just better for, and a weird build
like this is probably one of them. Maven focuses on standardizing
builds, but that standardization comes at the cost of imposing some
inflexibility, so you land up needing to write Maven plugins or break
out to antrun.

Anyway, for an open source project it comes down to whatever's best for
the people doing the work, and anybody else can put up or shut up. If
you like Ant, and it's not keeping potential contributors away (which
I'm sure it isn't) then there's no reason not to use it.

I would like to point at the Maven Ant Tasks, though, as they're useful
when you want to spit Maven artifacts out of an Ant build (say, so they
can be pushed to Central).

http://maven.apache.org/ant-tasks/index.html

My Ant experience is limited as I jumped ship to Maven quite early on,
but I'd be willing to try to integrate Maven artifact generation into
the pgjdbc build if that'd make it easier to keep Central up to date.

--
Craig Ringer

Tech-related writing at http://soapyfrogs.blogspot.com/