RE: Compiling

Mike Cannon-Brookes writes:

> 1) ant files are quickly becoming a standard for compiling almost all open
> source java projects

The nice thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from.
At PostgreSQL, we use the GNU-style build system, which is already the
"standard" for compiling almost all open source projects.

One important aspect of this being a "system" is that it works uniformly.
That means you can go to any subdirectory and run 'make; make install',
etc., no matter if Ant, MakeMaker, or broken-Python-build-environment is
running behind the scenes.

> 2) ant files are BUILT for java projects
> 3) currently we seem to have a build process that is 99% Ant and 1% make
> (for 4 substitutions). It seems unnecessarily complex to add make when we
> can remove it completely and not lose any functionality.
>
> On a related note, why does the JDBC driver need to track versions with the
> DB code? This seems pretty silly because it arbitrarily changes version
> without regard to what's changed in the JDBC driver. Why not split it off to
> have it's own versioning scheme? (This would get rid of any dependency on
> make as a nice consequence)

For informational purposes, I suppose.  We've had this discussion about
splitting of the JDBC driver before, but the latest trend is to integrate
everything as much as possible.

Incidentally, I suggested that we default the version number to 0.0 if
you're using Ant directly, but the end result of that might just be that
we're going to have a bunch of 0.0 drivers being used out there, thus
spreading an inconsistent software.

--
Peter Eisentraut      peter_e@gmx.net       http://yi.org/peter-e/