Re: [gentoo-soc] [GSoC] Maven integration for Gentoo ebuilds

[Kasun Gajasinghe <kasunbg@gmail.com>]

On 29 Mar 2011, at 14:42, Petteri Räty <betelgeuse@gentoo.org> wrote:

> On 03/29/2011 06:47 AM, Kasun Gajasinghe wrote:
>>
>> I'd like to know how the dependencies will be handled by maven based
>> ebuilds. Can you let me know the difference between dependencies
>> specified in Maven's POM file, and ebuild's dependencies? Are both
>> should be same? Since, Maven's POM contains the unique artifacts IDs
>> (with the combination of groupId, artifactId, version) which points  
>> to
>> a _binary_ jar, how should the developers who write _ebuilds_ specify
>> it? I got to know that dependencies are also ebuilds under gentoo  
>> i.e.
>> no binaries.
>>
>
> I am not sure how POM files categorize dependencies but in general  
> there
> should be some kind of a mapping between the two.
>
>> I've been going through the Ralph's (nick: sera ) suggested eclass
>> [1]. It turned out to be very useful. (sera, I got your name from  
>> [1],
>> hope it's correct! :) ). Because maven offline building is the  
>> biggest
>> issue Gentoo is currently facing, As Petteri suggested, I've been
>> going through to see how other distributions handle this. I see that
>> both in sera's eclass and in Debian's MavenRepoSpec [2], that they
>> specify a variable which points to a maven local-repository location.
>> Ralph's eclass specified MAVEN_REPO_DIR="${T}/maven-repo/" while
>> Debian has REPO=/usr/share/maven-repo. Since the file-system will be
>> read-only for ebuilds, and ebuilds should be built offline, what's  
>> the
>> purpose of this?
>>
>
> ${T} is a temporary directory for a single ebuild so it's writable.
>
>> Further, please let me know the other issues that needs to be
>> addressed that you have in mind. It turned out that the project is
>> challenging than I thought before, and is getting exciting now!
>>
>
> Besides writing the needed infrastructure for building with Maven it
> would also be useful to convert as much as possible of our manual
> ebuilds to use that infrastructure so that the solution will also be
> field tested. I see the work happening initially in a separate overlay
> with the goal of main tree merging before the project is over.
>

Ok great. I saw that there is functionality to create user-defined  
overlays at overlays.gentoo.org. I'll create a one there and do the  
implementation. Hopefully I can add a clone of gentoo-x86/dev-java/  
there first? I'm not sure how the version controlling happens then  
though!

Surely, I'll convert the current manually ebuilds to that  
infrastructure. I'm not aware of how much work is there. I'm hoping to  
continue working on it even after the Google Summer of Code over.
I think this is a great chance the students can get to contribute to  
open-source development with the initial push with an individually  
assigned mentor. I've done Google Summer of Code 2010 program under  
DocBook open repository and has continued my work even after the  
assigned project which gained me committer status. I'm sincerely  
expect to do the same with Gentoo this year.

Thanks,
Kasun

> Petteri
>