Mailing List Archive

> I see on the issue it mentions "See notes below on why this respin is
> needed."
>

I can't remember what I meant by that, to be honest...


> I'm not able to find the notes mentioned that talk about the reasons for
> the changes which would be nice to be able to look over... but I might just
> be looking in the wrong place, so if someone could point me to them that
> would be awesome!
>
> Also since this is a significant change, is anyone aware of some article,
> blog post, or internal discussion that talks about what was gained out of
> the switch over to Gradle (performance, ease of development, etc., or
> perhaps this would all be in the notes mentioned above).


The big reason was that the ant built had become slow and a nightmare to
maintain (macros, external tools, dependencies). The entire toolchain had
years of monkey patching all over the place. Maven would be another option
but Lucene does tricky stuff during its build and Maven doesn't yield
easily to customizations (in my opinion).

I think the best way to get a feeling for the reasons why the build had to
be modernized is if you compare the existing branch_8x and main -- look at
how ant build files are written and organized and try to build a few things
here and there... Then try to do the same things on main and you'll see the
difference, hopefully for the better.

Dawid

P.S. I happen to like ant very much - this has nothing to do with the tool
itself. Still, working with manual dependencies and writing complex stuff
in seems to be a thing of the past.