Maven Wrapper VS Bazel

Maven also has the maven wrapper: https://github.com/takari/maven-wrapper which accomplishes the same thing.

When creating a new Maven project, Micronaut also configures the Maven wrapper.

IDE's can be fiddly, and anyway I don't think it's good to depend on an IDE for building.

The project could have been set up instead with the "Maven wrapper"(1) which provides "mvn.cmd/sh" scripts at the top level of the project to fetch and run the proper Maven. So after cloning the project, all you have to do is set a proper JAVA_HOME and then do "./mvn clean package". The IDE's will then set themselves up properly if you import the project as a Maven project, and will sync with changes to the Maven pom.xml whenever it changes (Intellij does at least). That's really hard to beat.

(1) https://github.com/takari/maven-wrapper (Being integrated into Maven itself soon).

I got it from here: https://github.com/takari/maven-wrapper

> Now “obviously” the answer is that we should have pegged the version of gradle required to use the script

My first step with either gradle or maven is to install the wrapper generator, which has this effect. After adding the wrapper you invoke it via ./gradlew or ./mvnw in the project doirectory.

It’s not perfect - especially in terms of IDE support - but it’s crucial to at least keeping your CLI builds consistent across team members and in automation.

gradle wrapper: https://docs.gradle.org/current/userguide/gradle_wrapper.htm...

maven wrapper: https://github.com/takari/maven-wrapper

Wow, if you curl it, there's a lot of boilerplate code there.

Maybe built using Bazel?

https://bazel.build

Bazel by Google

Luckily a feature to limit the disk cache size is in development: https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazel/issues/5139

This is a problem that Bazel (https://bazel.build) solves in a very convenient way. You can just keep using the paths relative to the repository root, and as long as you properly declare your test needs that file it will access it without problems. Or you can use the runfile libraries to access them too.

When doing research for this lab exercise I looked at both vcpkg and conan. Both are package managers that would automate the installation and configuration of my program with its dependencies. However, when it came to releasing and sharing my program my options were limited. For example, the central public registry for conan packages is conan-center, but these packages are curated and the process is very involved. There was no way conan-center would accept a class project like mine. Alternatively, I could host a conan package on a public Artifactory repository, but accessing the package requires users to add the repository to their conan remote. This already sounded like too many steps to expect regular users to follow - I already haven't setup any conan remotes, there's no way I could expect regular users to know about conan remotes, let alone have conan installed on their system. After discussing with people online and consulting my instructor, I ultimately decided to do a GitHub release. However, in the future I was encouraged to look into using CMake or bazel.

NOTE: I won’t mention SBT and Leiningen here because, with all due respect, they are niche build tools. I also won’t discuss Kobalt for the same reason (besides, it’s no longer actively maintained). Additionally, I won’t touch upon Bazel and Buck in this context, mainly because I’m not very familiar with them. If you have insights or comments about these tools, please feel free to share them in the comments 👇

> None of this solves C's only REAL problem (in my opinion) which is the lack of dependency management.

Bazel solves this really nicely, I know some people have strong opinions on it but I cannot recommend it enough

https://bazel.build/