[Building Sakai] sakai-2.9.x-all build broken

[David Adams]

Steve Swinsburg wrote:
> This is an interesting discussion as it directly relates to the
> usefulness of the indies projects. A question, why do you want
> to build the source of all indies? Unless you've modified them,
> you can just let Sakai deploy the binaries and then updates are
> as easy as changing the version in the master pom.

We do modify several of the indies, however, more importantly, we modify the kernel, which I believe requires us to build everything that includes the kernel-util jar (ie, everything). But I don't claim to understand the build and deploy process very well. Delivery of elements of Sakai as overlay zipfiles can also cause other problems for people who need to do any customization to Tomcat's directory structure.

As for updating the version of indies in the master pom and redeploying, isn't that going to introduce other version conflicts? Seems to me that to upgrade a particular subproject, updating the source URL in the svn:externals property, updating, and rebuilding is far safer.

In general I personally don't understand why all of these core projects are being moved to "indie" releases. Is it to shorten compile times? When I download the source code for an open source project, I don't expect that over half of it will be delivered at deploy time as prebuilt zipfile overlays from remote servers over which I have no control. If we wanted the binary distribution, we would download the binary distribution.

Finally, if there's no benefit to providing all of the source code, then why is there a sakai-2.9.x-all branch available? If sakai-2.9.x-all has a purpose, then -all tags surely do as well.

-dave
-- 
David Adams
Director, Learning Systems Integration and Support
Virginia Tech Learning Technologies