Paul,
first of all, thank you for your ideas and sorry for not answering earlier.
Once more I catched a cold and so I did not find the power to spend my
evenings with complex issues. More inline.
> Every time we release Jersey we do the following:
> - make a tag of the trunk;
> - change the version in the trunk of all modules from "xxx-
> SNAPSHOT" to "yyy-SNAPSHOT"; and
> - change the version in the tag of all modules to "xxx" and deploy
> the maven artifacts to the repo.
> It makes it a lot easier to manage releases if all module versions are
> in sync and we release at the same time. Generally all Jersey modules
> tend to have a coupling of Jersey APIs where we also tend to, at least
> currently, have a fast update between components to fix issues and
> support features. So i would prefer to retain this approach.
> Do you envisage having a different release cycle to that of Jersey as
> well as a different version number?
> Maybe the contribs area is not really suitable in this respect and we
> need another area separate from Jersey for components that can be
> versioned and released independently? e.g.
> trunk/components
> I think that may better suit your requirements based on what you say
> above and below. i.e. i don't want to unduly constrain your
> development and what you depend on. We can set up separate Hudson jobs
> to build components.
In fact, WebDAV stuff is not related to Jersey in any way. The project was
build solely on JAX-RS 1.0, and does not know about any Jersey specific
thing. So from a technical aspect, it is not a Jersey component in the
narrow sense, but more a usage of Jersey, just as it could be a usage of any
other JAX-RS 1.0 implementation. This is the reason why the release politics
makes sense to stay different from Jersey's. WebDAV just has no technical
need to keep anything in sync with Jersey. The problem is that it seems
there is no really good place to put it. Actually WebDAV is neither a
contrib to the Jersey engine while it IS one to the Jersey project as a pool
of RESTful technology projects, and it neither is a component of the Jersey
engine. I wouldn't say that it would be best to put it into its own top
level project, but maybe it would be good to have a new folder containing
projects like mine which just USES JAX-RS but not directly Jersey, and which
could be downloaded separately? I'd like people of other JAX-RS
implementations being able to use WebDAV, and that would be the best way for
that. So Jersey could be two things: A JAX-RS implementation with additional
features PLUS a set of JAX-RS components independent of the JAX-RS
implementation. This would also be a good place to put Daniel Manzke's
"Microsoft Interoperability" stuff. What do you think about that?
> Note that JAX-RS does require support on SE 5, so the additional
> Jersey modules require it as well. In IDEs (at least in NetBeans) you
> can set a project to use SE 6 but compile SE 5 constrained source to
> catch errors.
Actually what your wrote into the spec is that SE 5 OR LATER is needed, so
it is not a constraint to exactly match SE 5 in all projects that are USING
JAX-RS -- and my code just USES Jersey. My WebDAV code targets in Java EE 6
contained JAX-RS, so SE 6 is what I develop and test upon (and what I can
afford -- I have no time to explicitly test drive on SE 5). Again, WebDAV is
nothing that is inside of Jersey, and it sits ontop of it, so if somebody
wants to use WebDAV he must use SE 6 (which is not a problem in times of SE
6 everywhere and EE 6 published soon). I do not see the actual problem right
now. Can you elaborate on this so I could understand (anyways I have no time
to check SE 5, and my Eclipse will not know what APIs are not existing in SE
5 unless I install SE 5 in addition to SE 6, which I just will not due since
I do not understand the need)?
> Jakub will know more, he is our Maven guru :-)
Did not hear anything from him so far, so it seems it was OK what I did.
> > As "1.0" effectively means
> > "[1.0,)" I
> > do not see why it is better than my explicit "[1.0,)"...?!
> Oh! i guess i do not understand maven version declarations :-) i want
> to be clear under what conditions Jersey has been tested against but
> did not want to necessarily restrict developers to using other
> versions.
Then you should change from your "1.0" (i. e. "1.0, or later than 1.0") to
my "[1.0;2.0)" (i. e. "anything in the range from 1.0 to but not including
2.0"), which more clearly says that API changes (2.x, 3.x) are not accepted,
while bug fixes are.
Have Fun
Markus