On Fri, Feb 4, 2011 at 12:48 PM, Alessio Stalla alessiostalla@gmail.com wrote:
when I understand better how the whole [Maven] release process works, I'll report here with more information.
Ok, so I experimented a bit with Maven and the free Sonatype repositories. To do a release, you need to produce the jar, sources-jar, and javadoc-jar of your project, and sign them with a gpg key. You then have to publish them to the repository; doing it (i.e. signing + publishing) with Maven is probably the easiest thing, although there's a way to do it with Ant too (but you have to have additional Maven Ant tasks installed on your system). As a bonus, you can ask your repository to be automatically synced to Maven Central, making it super easy for Maven users to use your project. The release must be manually confirmed to be migrated from the "staging" repository to the "public releases" repository; this is the only non-automatic step. The full process is detailed here: https://docs.sonatype.org/display/Repository/Sonatype+OSS+Maven+Repository+Usage+Guide
As far as I can tell, no special format is *required* for the sources and javadoc jars, although the ones generated by Maven of course have a precise format: basically the packed src directory for sources, and the packed doc root directory for javadocs (you can see an example here: https://oss.sonatype.org/content/repositories/releases/com/googlecode/ehcache-spring-annotations/ehcache-spring-annotations/1.1.2/. ABCL doesn't have many javadocs, and anyway those are certainly not the main part of the documentation; but the javadoc jar is required and, if it follows the convention, it can be automatically picked up by Eclipse when you add ABCL as a Maven dependency.
Morale: this is not terribly complicated, and it would make ABCL available through another distribution channel. OTOH, I can't hide the fact that - besides my own personal convenience for my shared project - probably no-one is using ABCL in Maven projects right now, and having ABCL released through Maven would complicate its release process, not much for technical reasons but for organizational ones (e.g. who keeps ABCL's GPG key? How is it managed?). So, if you accept Maven release to be an official step in ABCL's release process, that would be great for me and I could of course help in setting it up, solving issues etc. Else, if you're ok with it, I can publish ABCL on Sonatype's repo on my own, without making it part of our official release policy; that means less hassle for ABCL, but more risk of stale Maven releases and other problems caused by having the release depend on a single person (of course I'll take the release seriously, but still, depending on a single individual is always problematic). The third option is NOT to release ABCL with Maven at all: if you think that it would hurt ABCL, either by complicating the release process too much, or by having too high a risk of out-of-date releases out in the wild, I will accept that.
Let me know of your opinions.
Bye, Alessio