On Mon, 2008-10-06 at 17:19 +0200, Guillaume Laforge wrote: [ . . . ]

Surely it is the case at the moment that Groovy is just the programming language for Grails in exactly the same way that Ruby is the programming language for Ruby on Rails. We all know this is fallacy but the wider world thinks it true.

Ruby has Buildr, Groovy has Gradle.

By having two high profile projects (Grails and Gradle) showing the benefit of Groovy in different spheres of use, it is made clear that Groovy is of wider applicability that one domain.

In the face of zero data this is unlikely to bear fruit. The same happened in the "Great Maven 1 Debate". Nothing happened apart from waffling until I actually put an Ant build together and force people to try it.

Not quite, you are acting as a unit of inertia, and that is the correct thing to do as a project manager. Actually I wish you would do this more widely in the Groovy project. For me too much gets slipped into Groovy without debate and without wide agreement. I think we have here a classic example of doing the right thing is some but not enough circumstances.

Returning to the main point: argumentation without data is not going to progress this, there has to be an example build on which to create proper debate and thence choice. Currently we have an Ant build (that needs a good rewrite), a potential Gant build, and a potential Maven build. For the expense of having a build,gradle file in the filestore (even if just temporarily) and giving Hans write permission to the Groovy store, you lose nothing and potentially gain a great deal. As I see it there can be a small competition between the Antofiles, the Mavenistas and the Gradlers to present to the Groovy developers a selection of build systems for their delectation and thence choice.

Where this debate started was that if people put effort into doing new builds (Ant, Maven or Gradle) then it must be a fair playing field with no predetermined decision already made.

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