EclipseLink/Build/NextGen/TychoAgenda

Tycho Adoption

Maven/Tycho Overview

What is Maven, Tycho, how is it different from ant.

• Ant is like a lego set. It provides a set of 'tasks' that can be put together however you want to do something.
• Maven is a build framework/model, that uses plugins to perform specific jobs at a specific time (compile source, generate jars, run tests, etc)
• Tycho is a Maven plugin that builds OSGi bundles, either from a POM (generate manifest) or Manifest-first.

Our goal

• To switch to building our OSGi bundles manifest first, with minimal impact on overal process.

Our planned usage

• Setup Maven Tycho projects to build OSGi bundles
  • configured most of our OSGi bundles to build using Tycho, and generate Eclipse style source bundles (exceptions being asm, antlr, javax.persistence, and oracle).
    • skipped for several reasons:
    • javax.persistence shouldn't build regularly
    • antlr and asm build from class files and do not change they also shouldn't be build regularly.
    • oracle process will be separate, may move to checking in or contributing to the compile dependency p2 the oraclecompiled copy (legal?).
• Call above from Ant to generate build

Planned changes

• resource dir structure
  • all resources in selected herarchy are included cannot seem to setup any kind of scripted exclude
• manifest changes
  • DBWS, DBWS Builder : servlet needs to be required bundle, not package import.
  • SDO : commonj-sdo needs to be required bundle
• build-dependency P2 repo
  • Maven pulls in all dependencies from a repo (virtual or actual p2 or maven format)
• asm/antlr generation.

Caveats

• Build now depends upon another tool, and has additional external dependencies. Cannot reduce without moving everything over to Maven.

Maven Adoption

What would need to change?

• directory/project structure
  • src tree
  • project names need to match artifact IDs

Why change (Pros)?

• May allow easier adoption and contribution if in a common build framework
• Currently we are circumventing most of the power of Maven.
  • cannot automatically run tests
  • circumventing 'defaults'. is non-standard
  • cannot utilize Tycho to generate features, or P2 site
  • cannot generate other artifacts, jar, javadoc, etc. due to current hierarchy.
  • appears we cannot utilize maven plugins to build on demand without Source repo linkage
  • no source repo linkage without project restructure

Cons

• lots of work
• others??