Re: [gentoo-dev] Suggestion

[Alistair Bush <alistair.bush@gmail.com>]

On Thursday 08 February 2007 10:38 pm, Jose San Leandro wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> A friend of mine and myself are willing to develop some tools to help
> ebuild development.
>
> We have some constraints, but we are thinking on something like:
> 1) A tool to ease writing ebuilds. It would take some parameters, i.e.:
>  1.1) Where are the sources?
>  1.2) Decompression algorithm?
>  1.3) Compile the sources?
>  1.4) Install man page(s)?
>  1.5) Install documentation?
>  1.6) Bind actions to USE flags?
> It would probably be interesting to define a set of pre-defined categories:
> standard GNU Autotools projects, perl/CPAN modules, python, ...

I see no reason why a good template and/or eclass can't handle this
>
> 2) A tool to deal with the unstandarized way to compile and install Java
> projects. The idea is to write a tool to try to find out:
>   2.1) Where are located the "main" .java sources.
>   2.2) Where are located the unit tests.
>   2.3) Where are the jar files generated (in case of Ant-based builds) when
> the project is built.
>   2.4) Where to get the dependencies.
> And once this information is available, fill the blanks of a pre-defined
> Maven2 pom.xml descriptor, and use it to drive the ebuild. This way it
> would allow compilation flags even if the original build mechanism didn't.
> We probably will ask for this specific issue to gentoo-java mailing list.
> We don't think a fully-automated tool is feasible to cope with all kind of
> projects, but we hope it could be of use for Java developers who don't use
> Gentoo but find interesting to get an ebuild with little effort.

I apologies as this will be critical.

Firstly I would be very interested in how you would handle to dependencies of 
a package within this build system.  Maven is natorious for wanting to 
download its dependencies (including plugins all its plugins) from a remote 
repository.  Something that the java team (and me personally) have been 
struggling with for sometime.

Secondly the java-*-2 eclasses are now very advanced wrt everything ant.   
They abstract a large portion of the functionality away from the ebuild 
(without lossing the flexability)

So here an anottated vim template that I currently use and that will hopefully 
( bug #164953 ) make it into the tree. 


# Copyright 1999-2007 Gentoo Foundation
# Distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License v2
# $Header: $

JAVA_PKG_IUSE="doc source"  #this appends the appropriate deps to
							#DEPEND(RDEPEND) for source

inherit java-pkg-2 java-ant-2    

DESCRIPTION=""
HOMEPAGE=""
SRC_URI="${P}.zip"

LICENSE=""
SLOT="0"
KEYWORDS="~amd64"

IUSE=""  

COMMON_DEP=""

RDEPEND=">=virtual/jre-1.4   #this is used by eclasses to determine the target 
class version
	${COMMON_DEP}"
DEPEND=">=virtual/jdk-1.4    #and this determines the source target
	app-arch/unzip
	${COMMON_DEP}"

EANT_BUILD_TARGET=""
EANT_DOC_TARGET=""

src_install() {
	java-pkg_dojar "${PN}.jar"
	use doc && java-pkg_dojavadoc build/javadoc
	use source && java-pkg_dosrc src
}

I find this ebuild template usually provides everything a java ebuild 
requires.

I would suggest you read the dev notes on the gentoo-java project page as well 
as reading the wiki.

>
> However, we are just in the definition stage. We haven't decided anything
> yet, and would like to know your suggestions, even if they aren't
> encouraging :).
>
> Thank you very much.
> Jose.

Please don't let me discourage you.  I would be very interested in your 
solutions for using maven and I believe the when 2.0.5 is released some form 
of pom re-writing could be possible (similar to what happens with build.xml 
files at the moment), but I dont believe there is a need to mavenify ant 
builds.  I believe it would be over complicated and have huge problems 
handling where the src and libraries within a package reside.   When it comes 
to ant (at least) I believe the present solution is far more adaptable and 
productive.


Alistair
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