Re: Ant installation (and other) issues!

On Sat, Oct 20, 2001 at 03:54:12PM +0200, Per-Olof Norén wrote:
> Hi all,
> I have been listening to the discussions about Ant and the build system.
> I think that the discussion is missing a point, which I will try to make here :-)

[ points for using Ant ]

I would describe current JDBC build topic in 4 points:

* What the JDBC developers find themselves comfortable with when
developing the driver. This seems to be Ant-based build
process.

* What the PostgreSQL core developers find themselves
comfortable with. This means keeping the overall PostgreSQL
build process complexity down and making the general
'./configure;make;make install' as smooth as possible.
As the rest of the PostgreSQL uses make, it would be simpler
for them to use make for Java too.

* Special case: general UN*X system, Java but no Ant. How
probable this is? User probably wants to compile all of
PostgreSQL distribution. One solution is to include Ant
.jars in PostgreSQL source.

* Special case: non-Unix system, Unix tools are hard to use,
Ant is easier. How probable this is? User is hacking only
JDBC.

I sent a patch earlier which solves the above problems by
using both Ant and make to compile JDBC: when driver is
compiled with rest of the PostgreSQL, the build is make-only,
but it also makes Ant-only build possible by preparing
ant.cfg file with configure variables.

But this has new problem: now two build systems must be
maintained. Whether this is acceptable depends on how complex
they are and how often they must be modified. I tried to
keep the make variant as simple as possible: no dependencies
need to be tracked specially, only few special files are
mentioned explicitly.

On what direction to take the final word must be said by JDBC
developers, as they are most affected by it.

--
marko