[gatein-dev] Build update

[Julien Viet]

Hi,

we are currently working on the build after the GIT migration, one of the current issue is profile selection. 

The most important issue we are solving is that performing a release is error prone and often fails to perform the release properly: often POM are not versionned by the release plugin, du to the fact that it uses incorrect profile activation. Of course it is always possible to have it working by selecting the good profiles in the release plugin and on the command line, however it is error prone and it is hard to figure out by looking at the build what should be used.

We are going to change how the build work with profiles, not because we don't use profiles the right way, but because Maven profile activation is not good enough. (activeByDefault is broken, you cannot have flexible activation, etc...)

We still need to use profiles and actually we don't change the current profiles, what we do change is how their activation is done with a simple and important change: "Everything is built by default"

It means that the command "mvn install" builds everything (all server packaging, docs, examples, etc...). This guarantees that release plugin will release properly the project. Obviously we need to address developer productivity and we do provide a way to perform a build that saves the most time we can when it is activated in a simple manner.

To achieve it we use profile activation based on properties: the gatein.dev property is introduced to do it.

When this property is not present, the build behaves as said before : it builds everthing.

When it is selected with any value, it means that the build is done for development purpose and it skips some parts of the build (examples, docs, most of packaging).

When it is selected with a server value, it build that server only : for instance "mvn install -Dgatein.dev=jetty" . The possible values are 

- tomcat
- jbossas5
- jbossas6
- jbossas
- tomcat6
- tomcat7
- jetty

Another issue to fix is the selected database for running the unit tests, but I believe it affects you less because most of you are using hsqldb tests. To perform tests with MySQL, the profile -Pmysql5 can be used. 

Several things to note:

- The README file of GateIn has been updated with the information
- AS7 build is not yet finished and is cut of the build (which means that doing a release would not version the AS7 poms)

Let me know if you have any issue with the build.

Julien