Alex, I believe there is a disconnect between folks who are used to maven and those who are not. The beauty of maven is that the user does not need to have anything pre-installed on their computer. Write some code and simply run "mvn install". This simple command takes care of downloading the SDK, dependencies, compiling the code and generating the desired artifacts.
Compare that with Ant: You download the SDK, dependencies, create environment variables, build properties etc. before you can do anything. As evidenced with Flex SDK and FlexJS, setting all this up and getting everything built is a big task in itself. Any contribution can be done ONLY after doing all this work, which takes several tries to say the least. I think what Chris is saying is quite straightforward: lets make it easy to build the FlexJS SDK. Maven is one way to do it. Chris, from your side, I hope you can continue to lead this 'mavenizing' effort. Most of the time, I don't follow what you doing although I understand that they are important steps in achieving this goal. If you can come up with a plan of action and describe what you want to do, I am sure that the community will come together to help out. Mavenizing does not mean we give up on Ant. Alex (and others who are happy with Ant) can continue to build with Ant. I don't expect Alex to drop what he is working on and help with the Mavenizing effort, although any help from him would be appreciated. Let's start with mavenizing FlexJS. Thanks, Om On Thu, Nov 5, 2015 at 11:20 PM, Alex Harui <aha...@adobe.com> wrote: > > > On 11/5/15, 10:35 PM, "Christofer Dutz" <christofer.d...@c-ware.de> wrote: > > >Moving this thread to public dev list ... > > > >Adding my statement from the initial thread, that from now on I will stop > >contributing to things not built by a sensible build (doesn't have to be > >Maven even if I strongly suggest it). > > I’m going to take that as a softening of your position. I don’t think > anybody would argue that builds should not be “sensible”, but what does > that really mean? And what practical steps can we do that doesn’t grind > feature development and bug fixing to a halt? > > And I’d like to hear from others: Would better build scripts cause you to > contribute more? Would switching from Ant to Maven cause you to > contribute more? What else could we change that would get you to start > contributing or contribute more? > > For sure, at the time Adobe transitioned Flex to Apache, having the Flex > SDK work with Maven was the number one vote getter in JIRA. For FlexJS, > I’m more worried about getting enough features and functionality to the > early adopters such that they provide us the positive testimonials we need > such that enterprises might start using FlexJS and then start asking about > Maven. IMO, if we don’t get traction, it won’t matter what our builds > look like. I keep hoping others will start contributing, and in the > upcoming 0.5.0 release I invested several days in trying to make the > builds more sensible because folks said that was a barrier. But what else > do we need to do in this area? Can others step in to help? > > IMO, the good and bad of Apache being a “do-ocracy” is that, while you can > work on pretty much whatever interests you, at least in this project, > others tend to watch you work. Maybe there’s something we can tweak so > more folks jump in. I often think folks still think that we are still in > the “old days” where you had very little influence on the release that > Adobe would offer up on occasion and haven’t fully understood that in the > Apache world, things are almost the exact opposite. There is no corporate > entity that decides what gets done, individuals can’t just be passive > customers: they need to somehow find the time to help get things done. > It could just be by using the releases, but it would be much better if > folks who know Maven could help you create a Maven builds for our repos, > and folks who know Java could try to work on the compiler, etc. Yes, > Adobe pays me to work on Flex, but Adobe is not backing Flex like it used > to. It has turned the future of Flex over to Apache and the Apache Flex > community. > > Anyway, feel free to keep venting for a bit, and even take a break if you > need to, but I hope you will stick with us and we can open an discussion > on more concrete things that we might be able to do to make the builds > more “sensible” and maybe even break it down into small pieces that others > can help with. > > -Alex > >
