Re: Dependency between Publishers?

My thinking was that a user might have already entered a list of artifacts from the build they performed in the archiver section. I wanted to leverage that list of artifacts as my "stuff to examine" when it came time to run a tool like FindBugs, run javadoc over, or to publish those artifacts with Ivy. This way I wouldn't need to list out the "stuff" a project produced several times. 

I guess the other way I could do this would be to allow each BuildStep to look for artifacts in a certain directory. If my Ant projects all put thier artifacts into a "build" directory, I could set the location for each plugin to "build" in the global settings. I have to repeat that location a couple times (once for each plugin) but since its done only once and each sub-project would inherit the setting that wouldn't be so bad. This is probably a better way to go since adding dependencies between publishers would probably be more complicated than its worth.

I think what is making my plugins a bit different from the ones that exist right now in that I'm trying to actually automate the entire process of doing something like create javadoc. Where as the plugin that exists right now will run javadoc if you tell it all the right stuff to do. Since I have a team of people working on different things, it would be better for me if I could do something like configure a plugin to say, each project puts artifacts here, and then a project owner just checks a box and we get javadoc, they check another box and we get a report about something  - but the logic they put in the 
build.xml didn't have to mention any of that, and they didn't have to write any special files or anything either. There will still be times (my) users may want to provide some sort of special input specific to one of these tools, so they'll have some option to provide that, but my 95% use case would be someone checking a box and getting something set up.

(Its a little more complex than just run a tool and you are done, even for javadoc you may want the classpath of your dependencies - so I'll have to figure out something there, but I have some ideas.)

On 1/29/07, Kohsuke Kawaguchi <Kohsuke.Kawaguchi@xxxxxxx> wrote:

Eric Crahen wrote:
> I'd like to generate some reports on artifacts that the artifact archive has
> archived. I haven't found a way to officially configure the archiver to run
> before the reporter. So far, I appear to just be getting lucky when I check
> them both. Is there a way to express such a dependency?

I believe Hudson invokes listeners in the order they are placed in the
BuildStep.PUBLISHERS (if not, we should fix that.) So the poorman's
approach to this problem has been to place them in the right place in
the list.

It's certainly conceivable to come up with more elaborate scheme, like
perhaps by declaring dependencies, but I suspect it won't really buy us
that much.

Also, if all you're trying to do is to record the reports as a part of
build, and don't really care if it's a part of the "artifacts" or not,
then it's better to store reports on your own directory. For example,
junit report publisher does just that. The added benefit is that the
user won't have to configure two places to get it right.

If you really need to place things under the artifacts directory, your
publisher can just copy whatever you produced into the artifacts
directory on your own. I think this is pretty easy and not much code
duplication involved.

If you can explain a bit of context, I can probably give you better
suggestions.

--
Kohsuke Kawaguchi
Sun Microsystems                   kohsuke.kawaguchi@xxxxxxx

-- 

- Eric