RFR: JDK-8244093 Move all IDE support into coherent structure in make directory

[Magnus Ihse Bursie]

On 2020-04-29 13:36, Maurizio Cimadamore wrote:
>
> On 29/04/2020 11:57, Magnus Ihse Bursie wrote:
>> So who/what is using the ant build? I thought it was just the IDEA 
>> project that generated ant targets. Is it run explicitly using ant by 
>> langtool developers? I know for sure it's not used when we build the 
>> product in our CI.
>
> As Jan mentioned, the main purpose of the langtools Ant build is to 
> get very very fast incremental recompilation. Which happens to be very 
> useful when working in an IDE environment, but one can also use it 
> (and I've seen people doing that) just from the command line. You can 
> run most (all?) of langtools tests by just doing a private langtools 
> build, so langtools developers sometimes go down that path.
>
> Now, to be fair, this was much more common in the non-consolidated 
> world than it is in the new world, but, as Jan mentioned, Make is 
> currently not useful as a replacement for the private langtools build 
> because it has to go through the interim step and all that - and doing 
> that, even in the face of one line change in one file was taking 
> approx 15s recompilation time back when I did the test. So the private 
> build still has a purpose.
While I don't really like there to be two different and parallel build 
systems, I agree that the incremental behavior of the normal build 
system is not optimal. Let's work on getting that fixed -- but that's a 
long term goal.

In the meantime, there's obviously room for, and need of, a separate 
ant-based build system for langtools. If this is run manually by 
developers using "ant" on the command line, I see the point that it does 
not really belong in the IDE directory.

Let's say we keep it in langtools (unless we can find a better home for 
it). My question is: Are we talking only about build.properties and 
build.xml? Or are there more files that these depend on, that I had 
assumed belong to the IDE generation?

/Magnus

> Maurizio
>