Getting langtools into Maven Central

[Joe Darcy]

On 12/28/2011 2:14 PM, Jonathan Gibbons wrote:
> It may be appropriate to do this for OpenJDK 6 and 7, but it is 
> probably not appropriate for pre-release builds of 8.
>
> JSR 199 and JSR 269 are not available on JDK 5.

While JSRs 199 and 269 are shipped as part of JDK 6 and are part of the 
Java SE 6 specification, they are officially also available as 
"standalone technologies," meaning they can be used separately from JDK6 
and can run on top of JDK 5.

Likewise, the maintenance update of JSR 269 done as part of Java SE 7 
[2], can run on top of a JDK 6.

However, we have not made jar files of just the JSR 269 API elements in 
javax.lang.model.* available as separate jar files to facilitate 
standalone usage.  The intention of making JSRs 199 and 269 usable 
standalone was to allow IDEs to use the language model for, say, Java SE 
6, while running on top of JDK 5.

-Joe

[1] http://docs.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/technotes/guides/standards/
[2] http://jcp.org/aboutJava/communityprocess/mrel/jsr269/index.html

>
> -- Jon
>
> On 12/28/2011 08:45 PM, Jesse Glick wrote:
>> Since official releases of langtools are now available under a 
>> permissive license, has any thought been given to getting it 
>> published on Maven Central for various uses?
>>
>> 1. Programs running on JDK 5, or Java 6+ JRE, should be able to use 
>> JSR 199/269 just by declaring a dependency on it.
>>
>> 2. Projects should be able to able to use these APIs in unit tests, 
>> e.g. to compile code snippets, without fear that tools.jar will not 
>> be in the test classpath. Currently you have to use a system-scope 
>> hack [1] which is not portable and can cause fatal errors dealing 
>> with released POMs if you are not careful (e.g. follow the 
>> recommended idiom, which broke due to the Oracle acquisition [2]).
>>
>> 3. Projects may wish to compile sources using a specific version of 
>> javac [3], especially if they use exotic generics features and so on; 
>> some builds of javac contain known bugs that were later fixed, but 
>> you cannot rely on every developer checking out your project to have 
>> the latest update installed. Would be great to have a 
>> plexus-compiler-api plugin [4] using JSR 199, where the langtools 
>> release could be overridden via <plugin>/<dependencies>.
>>
>> I did a quick search for existing artifacts; besides JSR 308, the 
>> only one I could find is sorcerer-javac [5], which is from an old 
>> snapshot (compiler-7-ea-src-b12-06_may_2007.zip).
>>
>> It would be great to get langtools from OpenJDK 7 (using -target 5) 
>> published on Maven Central, probably via OSSRH [6]. For maximum 
>> flexibility it could be split into several artifacts, with logical 
>> interdependencies (deps on #1 would be marked <optional> since Java 
>> 6+ users do not necessarily want them separately):
>>
>> 1. javax.annotation.processing + javax.lang.model + javax.tools
>> 2. com.sun.source >#1
>> 3. com.sun.tools.javac >#2
>> 4+ javadoc, javap, javah, doclets, apt...?
>>
>> or more simply into javax.** vs. com.sun.** artifacts.
>>
>> Publishing regular updates would ideally require Ant targets to build 
>> the requisite JARs (binary, sources, javadoc) and deploy them to the 
>> staging server, which I guess you mean a patch to make/build.xml. 
>> Some mapping from OpenJDK Hg tags (jdk7u2-b13) or printed versions 
>> (1.7.0_02) to standard-format Maven versions like 7.0.2 might be 
>> necessary to make comparisons happy.
>>
>> Does this sound like a good direction to take? If so, I could try to 
>> set up OSSRH for the project and supply a patch for the build script, 
>> though it would be best for organizational reasons if an OpenJDK 
>> committer working on langtools did the actual publishing on an 
>> ongoing basis.
>>
>>
>> [1] http://maven.apache.org/general.html#tools-jar-dependency
>> [2] http://java.net/projects/sezpoz/sources/svn/revision/156
>> [3] 
>> https://jira.codehaus.org/browse/MNG-1867?focusedCommentId=231831&page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel#comment-231831
>> [4] 
>> http://plexus.codehaus.org/plexus-components/plexus-compiler/plexus-compiler-api/apidocs/index.html
>> [5] 
>> http://search.maven.org/#artifactdetails%7Corg.jvnet.sorcerer%7Csorcerer-javac%7C0.8%7Cjar
>> [6] 
>> https://docs.sonatype.org/display/Repository/Sonatype+OSS+Maven+Repository+Usage+Guide
>>
>