[Building Sakai] Conformation on Tomcat and Maven version for Sakai 2.9

[Matthew Jones]

Answers inline!

On Thu, Apr 19, 2012 at 7:15 PM, Mustansar Mehmood <mustansar at rice.edu>wrote:

>  Hi,
>    I may have missed some announcements and am a bit confused about the
> proper version requirements for Sakai 2.9.
> 1- What tomcat version is recommended for Sakai 2.9.x. I think it is 7
> what confuses me is that what happens when we dont follow the optional
> steps in the development walk through tutorial
>
> https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/BOOT/Development+Environment+Setup+Walkthrough
>
>    1.
>
>    [OPTIONAL] Delete the default webapps from the webapps dir
>
>
>    rm -rf webapps/*
>
>      2. Configure tomcat 7 to use the old tomcat 5.5 classloader dirs
>       1. Edit *conf/catalina.properties*
>          1.
>
>          Add the following to the line that begins with
>          "common.loader=..."
>
>
>          ,${catalina.base}/common/classes/,${catalina.base}/common/lib/*.jar
>
>            2.
>
>          Add the following to the line that begins with
>          "shared.loader=..."
>
>
>          ${catalina.base}/shared/classes/,${catalina.base}/shared/lib/*.jar
>
>            3.
>
>          Add the following to the line that begins with
>          "server.loader=..."
>
>
>          ${catalina.base}/server/classes/,${catalina.base}/server/lib/*.jar
>
>             2.
>
>       [OPTIONAL] Create the directories
>
>
>       mkdir -p shared/classes shared/lib common/classes common/lib server/classes server/lib
>
>
>
>
Tomcat 7 is recommended for Sakai 2.9.x. I believe the TCC even went as far
as saying Tomcat 7 was required.

https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/TCC/2011+TCC+Voting+Summary

If you build with the -P pack-demo target, it correctly modifies these
properties and startup files so it works according to the directions,
otherwise you'll have to do it manually. When Sakai 2.9 is officially
released this will get a prominent section in the release notes. The
optional steps 1a is just a cleanup (to remove the default webapps that
tomcat deploys like ROOT) and the optional b.ii. isn't really necessary
because when you unpack the binary or do a deploy, it will make those
directories anyway.

Before Sakai 2.9 is released I plan on writing up a split configuration
which we used at Michigan that has the CATALINA_HOME (the tomcat files)
separate from the CATALINA_BASE (the Sakai binaries). This is pretty cool
because it allows you to do much easier upgrades of both tomcat and Sakai,
and also works well with how many distributions (like unix) deploy their
tomcat. Though ubuntu has the concept of a private instance installer as
well as the global instance now, so it's not that big of a deal. :)


> 2- Do we need to change this line in settings.xml
>  <appserver.id>tomcat5x</appserver.id> to reflect tomcat 7?
>

I wasn't sure what this was used for. I searched the trunk-all and it's in
2 files
reset-pass/account-validator-tool/pom.xml
25:      <appserver.id>${sakai.appserver.id}</appserver.id>

site-manage/site-manage-participant-helper/pom.xml
26:        <appserver.id>${sakai.appserver.id}</appserver.id>

However it's just being used "as properties" and appserver.id isn't even
used. So since I've never defined it, I don't think it's useful. ;) (If it
is maybe someone else could say, but it's never broke anything for me not
having it)

Secondly, is sakai 2.9.x supposed to with with maven 3 ?  If so I am
> getting errors in building Fresh copy of Sakai-2.9.x-all
>
> Maven 2 OUTPUT
> ==========
> [INFO] Scanning for projects...
> [INFO]
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> [ERROR] FATAL ERROR
> [INFO]
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> [INFO] Error building POM (may not be this project's POM).
>

This error is based on the JDK 7. Earle did some work to make trunk
compatible with JDK 7 but we didn't merge many of these back to 2.9.x yet.
Since Java 6 is EOL in November 2012, I think that these all should get
merged. This is tracked on SAK-20908 and the specific merge for search was
at https://source.sakaiproject.org/viewsvn?view=revision&revision=104897.
2.9.x-all as of *today* won't build and many tests fail under JDK 7, and
it's still being released with JDK 7. I believe it should still be compiled
with a JDK 6 target but should run and compile under 7.

As far as the maven version, Maven 3 is recommended. The way indies are
released they will cause checksum errors on the metadata if you try to
build 2.9.x (the non-all version) with Maven 2, but it still works.
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