Some rough stats (because I was curious): The gradle files have been edited by ~79 unique contributors over 696 distinct commits, whereas the maven ones were edited (over a longer time period) by ~130 unique contributors over 1389 commits [1]. This doesn't capture how much effort was put into these edits, but neither is restricted to a small set of experts.
Regarding "friendly for other languages" I don't think either is necessarily easy to learn, but my impression is that the maven learning curve shallower for those already firmly embedded in the Java ecosystem (perhaps due to leveraging existing familiarity, and perhaps some due to the implicit java-centric conventions that maven assumed about your project), whereas with gradle at least I could keep pulling on the string to unwind things to the bottom. The "I just want to build/test X without editing/viewing the build files" seemed more natural with Gradle (e.g. I can easily list all tasks). That being said, I don't think everyone needs to understand the full build system. It's important that there be a critical mass that do (we have that for both, and if we can simplify to improve this that'd be great), it's easy enough to do basic changes (e.g. add a dependency, again I don't think the barrier is sufficiently different for either), and works well out of the box for someone who just wants to look up a command on the website and edit code (the CLI is an improvement with Gradle, but it's clear that (java) IDE support is a significant regression). Personally, I don't know much about IDE configuration (admittedly the larger issue), but one action item I can take on is trying to eliminate the need to do a "git clean" after building certain targets (assuming I can reproduce this). Perhaps we should go through and prioritize (and add missing items to) BEAM-4045 https://issues.apache.org/jira/issues/?jql=parent%20%3D%20BEAM-4045%20ORDER%20BY%20priority%20DESC ? There's always a long tail with this kind of thing, and looking at the whole list can be daunting, but putting it in the correct order and knocking off the top N items could possibly go a long way. - Robert [1] The commands I ran were (with and without the uniq) $ find . -name 'build.gradle' | xargs git log | grep Author: | grep -o '[^< ]*@' | sort | uniq | wc $ find . -name 'pom.xml' | xargs git log | grep Author: | grep -o '[^< ]*@' | sort | uniq | wc On Wed, Oct 10, 2018 at 10:31 AM Etienne Chauchot <echauc...@apache.org> wrote: > Hi all, > I must admit that I agree on the status especially regarding 2 points: > 1. new contributors obstacles: gradle learning curve might be too long for > spare-time contributors, also complex scripted build takes time to > understand comparing to self-descriptive one. > 2. IDE integration kind of slows down development. > > Now, regarding how we improve the situation, I think we need to discuss > and identify tasks and tackle them all together even if they are not sexy > tasks as Ismaël mentioned. > > Etienne > > Le mardi 09 octobre 2018 à 10:04 +0200, Jean-Baptiste Onofré a écrit : > > Hi guys, > > > I know that's a hot topic, but I have to bring this discussion on the table. > > > Some months ago, we discussed about migrating our build from Maven to > > Gradle. One of the key expected improvement was the time to build. > > We proposed to do a PoC to evaluate the impacts and improvements, but > > this PoC was actually directly a migrate on master. > > > Now, I would like to bring facts here: > > > 1. Build time > > On my machine, the build time is roughly 1h15. It's pretty long, and > > regarding what the build is doing, I don't see huge improvement provided > > by Gradle. > > 2. Build reliability > > Even worse, most of the time, we need to use --no-parallel and > > --no-daemon to have a reliable build (it's basically recommended for > > release). It has an impact on build time, and we loose part of Gradle > > benefits. > > 3. Release and repositories > > Even if couple of releases has been performed with Gradle, it's not > > obvious to see improvements around artifacts handling. I got my > > repository polluted twice (that's part of the trick Gradle is doing to > > speed up the build dealing around the repository). > > 4. IDE integration > > We already had some comments on the mailing lists about the IDE > > integration. Clearly, the situation is not good on that front too. The > > integration on IDE (especially IntelliJ) is not good enough right now. > > > We are working hard to grow up the community, and from a contributor > > perspective, our build system is not good today IMHO. > > As a contributor, I resumed my work on some PRs, and I'm spending so > > much time of the build, largely more than working on the PRs code itself. > > > So, obviously, the situation is not perfect, at least from a contributor > > perspective. > > > The purpose of this thread is not again to have a bunch of replied > > ending nowhere. I would like to be more "pushy" and let's try to be > > concrete. So basically, we only have two options: > > > 1. Improve the build, working hard on Gradle front. Not sure if it makes > > such sense from a contributor perspective, as Maven is really well known > > from most of contributors (and easier to start with IMHO). > > 2. Back on Maven. That's clearly my preferred approach. IDE integration > > is better, Maven is well known from the contributors as already said. > > The effort is not so huge. We tried to use Gradle, we don't have the > > expected results now, that's not a problem, it's part of a project lifetime. > > > Thoughts ? > > > Regards > > JB > > > >
