Re: FW: Re: [PATCHES] Ant configuration

Tom,

My reasons for not wanting to depend on Ant are:

Many binary distributions of Postgres are not including the JDBC code
because of the added overhead of the jdbc build process (i.e. getting
Ant installed).

Users have complained to the mail lists in the past about the
requirement for Ant (they expect make; make install to work for jdbc
just like it does for the rest of the postgres).

(However I realize there are equally good arguments on why depending on
Ant is a good thing.) Thus I thought a good compromise was to include
the Ant libraries in postgres for building, however after seeing the
size of them, I agree that is clearly not an option.

Your rationale with regards to "since you require java to build, what is
one more dependency" is a little flawed. The java dependency is both a
build time and runtime dependency. In order to use the result of the
build you need java so the expectation that you will have java if you
are dealing with jdbc is high (otherwise why would you bother). However
the dependency on Ant is only for building.

The one thing this thread has made abundantly clear for me it that we
are far from agreement on what the ideal solution is (and there probably
isn't an ideal solution), thus I feel we should stick with status quo
for 7.2 and deal with all of this in a few months after 7.2 is production.

thanks,
--Barry

Tom Lane wrote:

> Barry Lind <barry(at)xythos(dot)com> writes:
>
>>If we can include the ANT libraries in our CVS then my
>>objection to ANT (requiring users to trackdown and download ANT) goes
>>away, and I would then suggest we continue to use ANT for the other
>>reasons you mention.
>>
>
> The sheer bulk of the ANT libraries rules that out, even if there
> weren't a management/synchronization issue: do you want a PG release to
> be using an older ANT than what you have already installed locally?
>
> On the other hand, I can see no reason why we shouldn't say that you
> *must* have ANT installed to build the JDBC driver. You've gotta have
> Java to build JDBC, no? Seems like ANT is just one more dependency,
> and hardly an unreasonable one if it's the standard for Java projects.
>
> What's wrong with saying "we don't build the JDBC driver if ANT isn't
> installed"?
>
> regards, tom lane
>
>