Re: [Jython-dev] Reworking build.xml

[Jim B. <jim...@py...>]

Jeff,

Your cleanup and observations make sense to me. I don't know the exact
history, but certain decisions in build.xml were no doubt prompted by
earlier VCS aspects - at the very least, Jython has been on Subversion and
Mercurial while I have worked on it, but surely it was even earlier on
something like CVS.

Looking forward: We can clearly can snapshot the build more readily and
reduce overhead. Ideally it's built purely in a fresh container, etc, as
part of an overall CI, but let's not get ahead of ourselves, especially
given testing realities on Windows, OSX, and Linux.

- Jim

On Mon, Aug 19, 2019 at 1:30 AM Jeff Allen <ja...@fa...> wrote:

> There are swathes of build.xml I've never really understood. Many are
> bits that have to work to make a release (full-build). A lot of this is
> good, but somewhat buggy, and it has been "particularised" to releases
> in the past, by which I mean what might have been general-purpose logic
> has become hard-coding of the answer for that particular release,
> presumably to work around some shortcoming in the logic.
>
> It is difficult to debug the full-build target because it checks out a
> fresh copy of the repo and works on that. This is slow, and in my
> experience frail. It also means that when testing some hacky idea, it
> (or parts of it) have to be pushed to the official repo. I think this is
> how the particularisations got into the official copy.
>
> So I'm trying the idea of full-build without the checkout. It's quite a
> big change to build.xml. Building a release from the directory where you
> do development is a bad idea, I know, because there are always extra
> files lying around that can get incorporated, or might be necessary to
> make it work, but you didn't check in. For the same reason, it is good
> routinely to have an integration workspace to which you pull before you
> push: with git it is a topic branch of your personal repo.
>
> I think that for a release, one would always check out to a clean
> workspace, so it is not necessary to have the script do it. I have
> incorporated tests to warn us when it is not clean (hg status, etc.),
> and then one can only build a "SNAPSHOT". Apart from these tests, the
> whole script gets somewhat simpler. Or maybe I just understand it better.
>
> I may have missed an important reason why we did the checkout elsewhere:
> do say if you know it.
>
> As always, this is turning up lots of things I never knew or noticed.
> E.g. have you noticed "ant clean" doesn't do a complete job these days?
> Not for me, anyway. I'm left with some editor droppings that have
> accumulated in my build/dist directories. They prevent a complete clean
> because of https://ant.apache.org/manual/dirtasks.html#defaultexcludes .
> And I have figured out the intended template processing of README.txt so
> it need not be kept in sync manually.
>
> I just thought I'd say on the list what I'm up to.
>
> --
> Jeff Allen
>
>
>
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