autobuilders and redownloading all sources from classpath.org servers

[Andrew Hughes]

----- Original Message -----
> On Tue, 2012-03-06 at 06:43 -0500, Andrew Hughes wrote:
> > Maybe it's worth looking at having a '--disable-downloading' option
> > for
> > the IcedTea build which can be used on autobuilders to make them
> > fail instead?
> 
> What would that configure option do precisely?
> Autobuilders still need to fetch the sources don't they?
> 

It's whether they do this automatically or not, or at least that's what I
was thinking.

What I was thinking is we'd add a --disable-downloading option that would
mean that if the tarball wasn't found, the build would fail rather than just
downloading from the IcedTea servers.   I think distro builds would like this
too.

At the moment, the build does a 'try the best to get there approach' where it
will download the tarball if it can't find the one specified or the one specified
has an incorrect checksum.  While I presume those who setup autobuilders or distro
builds are pretty familiar with the build by then (and can set --disable-downloading
when they are), the default of downloading works better for your average user who
expects ./configure && make to work.

I suspect what is happening with the autobuilders is they are either not configured
with paths to tarballs or (more likely) the tarballs they are being given are outdated
so the build is redownloading every time.  In the first case, the download would only
happen once and then the tarball would be in the build tree, but if a path is being set
which points to an old tarball, the build is always going to get that tarball, find it's
the wrong one and redownload.

> All I am hoping is that they don't do it multiple times a day, even
> when
> there have been no changes since the last run, as some of them seem
> to
> do now for the whole forest and/or download/drops.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Mark
> 

-- 
Andrew :)

Free Java Software Engineer
Red Hat, Inc. (http://www.redhat.com)

PGP Key: 248BDC07 (https://keys.indymedia.org/)
Fingerprint = EC5A 1F5E C0AD 1D15 8F1F  8F91 3B96 A578 248B DC07