Re: Please consider using Gradle

Jeremy Whiting <jwhiting@redhat.com> wrote:

> I suggest aiming higher and migrating to Gradle. There are a
> couple of main reasons. Gradle allows the flexibility of Ant
> builds only better because scripting is not in XML. Instead Groovy
> which is less painful to script. The second is Gradle supports
> deployment to artifact repositories including Nexus. Meeting the
> needs of Thomas.
>
> http://www.gradle.org/
>
>  You will probably find it less painful than using Maven.

*If* we're going to a different build tool than Ant, I can attest
that Maven is probably a bad choice.  Our shop switched new
development to it, and it was slow, complicated, and a resource hog.
Even the original proponents got behind changing off of it a few
months after we got it going.  We then switched to Gradle, which has
been relatively pain-free.

The big question is whether anyone is interested enough in making
that change to put the work into providing a patch that switches
things from Ant to Gradle so that people can try it out and make an
informed decision about whether they want to commit that to the
repository.  That's certainly not going to be me.  ;-)

I think this fits squarely into the open-source tradition of whoever
has the itch (finds the current state of affairs inconvenient) has
to be the one to scratch it or it won't get done.  If everyone does
that and shares the results, we all benefit.  That's how PostgreSQL
got here, and that's how it evolves.

I forget who was complaining about having to pay for two days of
programming effort to add a feature they wanted, but I remember they
addressed the list saying "It's *your* product."  I really should
have pointed out that really, if he's using it's his as much as
anyone else's.  He's getting the benefit of (easily) tens of
thousands of hours of work which individuals or their employers have
donated to the community.  I'm not sure why donating the 16 hours
that were on his dime has his back up, especially (as someone else
pointed out) it just means more work for him down the line when a
new driver comes out.

http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/FAQ#Who_controls_PostgreSQL.3F

-Kevin