View source for Buckminster Maven BIRT 20061017

Meeting minutes (collected mostly by John and then edited for the wiki by Thomas)

=Current Status=
==Buckminster Progress==
*Thomas has been looking at the BIRT build system
**Ant scripts are well structured. A lot can be reused
**Encountered and reported some inconsistencies to the BIRT team
**Need for new functionality in Buckminster
***Generate components on the fly
***Versioning (automatic tagging/versioning)
==BIRT Progress==
*Xiaoying did a Buckminster evaluation. Some issues
**Wiki is too complicated for newbies.
***Need step-by-step instructions
***Getting started guide with examples
**Questions and answers
***Q. Where are the compile logs
***A. Depends on where the build is performed
****within IDE :: it's the Problems view
****headless :: printed to stdout or stderr
***Q. Export part is unclear
***A. Like PDE build but instead invoking cspec actions
****Can be done from within the IDE by right-clicking a project, then Buckminster -> Invoke Action -> export.feature.
****In headless mode --> invoking buckminster perform xyz.export.feature
***Q. Will javadoc force a cspec extension to all plugins?
***A. Not necessarily. We could add automatic generation to Buckminster
***Q. How start again from failure point when one step in a large build fails?
***A. Would need to record the state of the build and pickup where left off...this is new feature, theoretical. can discuss.
***Q. Update site: does bucky export as an update site using pack200?
***A. Not out of the box, but we should be able to reuse existing BIRT script snippets to do this. The same is true for many of the different packaging options that exists for BIRT.
***Q. Support for build notifications: does bucky support this?
***A. No notifications yet. can probably reuse existing BIRT snippets, but nothing built-in yet
==Maven Progress==
*Maven-artifact adapting library is done, tested
*Difficulty with bucky: SVN support tied to win32
*Trying to understand some of the finer points of version handling in bucky
*Ready to wire in maven artifact lib to bucky, based on version question response
*'''ACTION: re-send version question to bucky dev list'''
=Steps Forward=
*BIRT: Regardless of if Buckminster is used or not, the BIRT build system must become PDE build compliant. The BIRT team will put a siginificant effort on this over the coming weeks.
*Buckminster: Working on becoming more PDE build compliant
**Will try to build the RCP platform
*BIRT/Buckminster rendezvois when both projects are close to PDE.
*Maven: Finalize public API so that Buckminster can use the Maven libraries for artifact support and to call plugins
=Milestones=
#17-Nov: Alpha version of BIRT build system based on PDE build. BIRT Milestone 2
#17-Nov: RC1 of Buckminster
#*Maven artifact support (no support for version ranges)
#*Maven plugin support
#*Check Buckminster Wiki for [[Tasks_(Buckminster)|planned features]]
#1-Dec: Achieve understanding of how to perform integration of BIRT build with Buckminster
#In coming months: Work closely with BIRT/Buckminster to get the conversion done.