[Biojava-l] Build systems

[Thomas Down]

We've been running for the last couple of months with two
alternative build systems:

  - build.Builder  -- a biojava-specific, and rather monolithic,
                      hack.  Simple, though, and avoids having
                      an outside dependancy.

  - ant -- nice and fast and configurable.  This seems to be
           becoming the de facto standard for most big Java
           projects.

For more information about and, or to download a copy:

    http://jakarta.apache.org/ant/index.html


I've been using ant almost exclusively for a while now, and
I know quite a few other people are.  I just found out this
morning that Builder.props (the configuration file for the old
system) has been broken for at least a week, and we haven't had
any reports of this until now.

So unless there are objections, I think the time has come
for build.Builder to die a quiet death.  I'd encourage anyone
who hasn't used ant before to download it and give it a try
now.  For building biojava, all you need to do is:

  - download and install ant
  - change into the biojava-live directory.
  - The ``ant''.
  - A biojava.jar build should appear in the ant-build subdirectory.

  - The ant build process is configured in the file
    biojava-live/build.xml

Right now, the one place ant is behind build.Builder is that
it doesn't do the nice grouping of packages in the javadoc output.
I'll get that fixed in the next day or two.

Let me know if you have any trouble with ANT.

   Thomas.