[gentoo-soc] Week 4 Report for Big Data Infrastructure and H2O ebuilds Project

["Yuan Liao (Leo)" <liaoyuan@gmail.com>]

Hi folks,

I have been quite busy creating the ebuilds that build the Kotlin
libraries from source during the past week, and I am pleased to report
that the work is now complete and the ebuilds are installable and
usable.  Every Kotlin library listed here [1] can be built from source
using those ebuilds.  All ebuilds have been pushed to my fork of the
Spark overlay [2].

To use the ebuilds to build the Kotlin libraries from source, binary
JARs for kotlin-stdlib and kotlin-reflect pre-built by the upstream
must be installed first for bootstrapping.  Then, after the Kotlin
compiler package -- dev-lang/kotlin-bin -- is installed, the libraries
can be built from source.  The exact commands to build and install the
libraries from source are:

    env USE="binary" emerge -a1 dev-java/kotlin-stdlib dev-java/kotlin-reflect
    emerge --ask dev-lang/kotlin-bin
    emerge --ask --update --newuse --deep @world

The ebuilds only use kotlinc and javac to build the Kotlin libraries.
Although Gradle is used by the upstream to build Kotlin, it is not
used in those ebuilds.  I extracted the commands Gradle would run to
build each library component to create those ebuilds.

I am currently in the process of writing a blog post describing how I
discovered the way to extract those commands from Gradle and
surmounted various challenges in creating those ebuilds, and I have
also planned to provide more documentation regarding installing and
maintaining those packages.  The blog post is supposed to be completed
today, but I really cannot make it because there are really lots of
things to talk about and my brain is slowing down as bedtime is coming
closer and closer.  I am sorry for the delay.  Once it is published
(hopefully tomorrow), I will post the link to it in a reply to this
email.  The link to the documentation will also be posted after it is
done.

Best regards,
Leo

[1]: https://github.com/JetBrains/kotlin/tree/v1.5.20/libraries
[2]: https://github.com/Leo3418/spark-overlay/tree/master/dev-java#:~:text=kotlin-annotations-jvm