On Mon, 2008-10-06 at 17:37 +0200, Guillaume Laforge wrote:

This is where we get to the crunch so let me be a little blunt.

Noone liked the Maven 1 build mostly because Maven 1 was dying and no-one (not even the Mavenistas :-) could understand what was going on.

A group of people wanted to move to a Maven 2 build, but a section of the core developers said "No Maven" using emotive statements and no technical arguments whatsoever. Yes there were problems, indeed there remain problems, with Maven -- though with Jason's work far fewer than there were.

I started the Ant build simply to get something moving. Everyone was waffling and complaining, and there were lots of comments like "but what are the technical arguments". In this situation actions speak a lot louder than words, the argumentation is better done in the presence of experimental data and not philosophizing. Having a working Ant build to compare to a working Maven 1 build enable the change because it enables discussion and argumentation based on data not prejudice and arm waving.

The Ant build has subsequently evolved to being a Maven build written in Ant. Paul has done some sterling work, and in many places worked magic. But what we have is a Maven build but disguised so the Maven haters will still allow its existence.

I started a Gant build for Groovy but with the arrival of an increasingly sophisticated Gradle, it seemed counter-productive to reinvent for Gant what was being invented for Gradle. The core difference is that Gradle uses Ivy where Gant tends to favour use of the Maven Ant task.

Rather than waffle and banter based on prejudice and no data, it is far better to put in a little effort in order to gain data. We already have a primitive Gant build that no-one uses or even comments on. If Gradle is as good as it claims to be, it should be a small job to create an initial build to get us to the point of having real data to properly debate.

Of course the Ant build is a disguised Maven build so perhaps those who favour Maven over Ant or Gradle could take a look at the current POM and make sure an actual Maven build is possible (*). This will raise an issue though -- the GMaven compiler does different things to the "standard" Groovyc joint compiler regarding stub creation for dealing with mixed Java/Groovy projects. Perhaps this needs to be split off as a new issue.

An awful lot of code gets slipped into Groovy without good technical argument. Be careful about using differing standards.

I agree that a step as big as a change of build infrastructure needs to be done with care and attention to detail. However the current Ant build is in a very analogous state to the old Maven 1 build. It is growing anarchically and at the very least needs a severe refactoring.

If a sever refactoring is in order then a review is in order. The outcomes are:

1. Refactor the Ant build and continue with it. 2. Switch to a full-on Maven build. 3. Switch to a Gradle build.

3 is of course a magic number.

(*) It seems Maven doesn't do the right thing just now:

|> mvn clean [INFO] Scanning for projects... [INFO]

------------------------------------------------------------------------ [INFO] Building Groovy [INFO] task-segment: [clean] [INFO]

------------------------------------------------------------------------ [INFO] [clean:clean] [INFO]

------------------------------------------------------------------------ [INFO] BUILD SUCCESSFUL [INFO]

------------------------------------------------------------------------ [INFO] Total time: 2 seconds [INFO] Finished at: Tue Oct 07 07:49:47 BST 2008 [INFO] Final Memory: 3M/6M [INFO]

------------------------------------------------------------------------ |> mvn test [INFO] Scanning for projects... [INFO]

------------------------------------------------------------------------ [INFO] Building Groovy [INFO] task-segment: [test] [INFO]

------------------------------------------------------------------------ [INFO] [resources:resources] [INFO] Using default encoding to copy filtered resources. [INFO] [compiler:compile] [INFO] Nothing to compile - all classes are up to date [INFO] [resources:testResources] [INFO] Using default encoding to copy filtered resources. [INFO] [compiler:testCompile] [INFO] Not compiling test sources [INFO] [surefire:test] [INFO] Tests are skipped. [INFO]

------------------------------------------------------------------------ [INFO] BUILD SUCCESSFUL [INFO]

------------------------------------------------------------------------ [INFO] Total time: 3 seconds [INFO] Finished at: Tue Oct 07 07:49:54 BST 2008 [INFO] Final Memory: 5M/9M [INFO]

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