Use a better tool than just Ant and Debian's package manager to manage dependencies
We need a better way to handle dependencies. As of now we require developers to use Debian stable and install specific packages that add their jar files to /usr/share/java/
. This approach already breaks as soon as there's a new Debian stable version, let alone the fact that developers might want to develop on a different operating system.
I started looking into Maven as an alternative to Ant. A few thoughts:
- I didn't find an "official" version of Apache Commons Codec in Maven Central, but I instead managed to get rid of that dependency. I did find recent versions of Apache Commons Compress and JUnit.
- I started working on a branch that switches from Ant to Maven, though I'm considering to change that towards adding Maven while leaving Ant as an option. I don't see any reasons why that would fail, but I haven't tried it yet.
- One thing I'm yet unclear about is how we would switch other projects like Onionoo over to Maven, because Maven only produces one artifact and we're currently producing two artifacts: a .jar and a .war file. I could imagine changing that to a single .jar and putting in a command-line switch to run either the hourly updater or the webserver. Not sure about downsides here. If this seems doable, I'd try it out with ExoneraTor first, because that one is tiny compared to Onionoo.
- I also briefly looked into Apache Ivy which wouldn't force us to change as many things as Maven would, but figured that the forced Maven switch would also lead to a cleaner build process overall. Happy to reconsider if there are arguments in favor of Ivy.
Other thoughts? Things that I overlooked?