JCommon & JFreeChart Distros OUT OF SYNC

[DaveLaw]

While downloading the JCommon sources to attach to the JFreeChart 1.0.14 Distro,
I noticed that the jcommon-1.0.17.jar in the JFreeChart Distro (2011.10.16 09:21)
differs from that in the JCommon Distro (2011.10.17 23:35).
There are a number of differences in classfile sizes.
In particular org.jfree.layout.FormLayout.class has grown from 11,332 bytes to 12,134 bytes in just 38 hours.

[david.gilbert]

That's bad! Honestly I don't know what has happened here, and it will be hard for me to figure it out (since most of my build workspaces from last year no longer exist). I'll definitely be more careful with the upcoming JFreeChart 1.0.15 release.

Personally, I'd recommend always building everything from source, there's no other way to be sure what code you are running.

[DaveLaw]

I'm a great fan of not building ANYTHING from source!
(Just need to get those *nix nerds in on that:
you DO NOT install an operating system by compiling it!
Hmmm, maybe more than I can chew, that bite!)

Its really important that things that are the same, ARE the same! (thats not a Typo)
By that I mean they should have the same size, timestamp, attributes, name etc.

Probably the only way to guarantee that you're including the JCommon Distro
is actually to include the JCommon Distro!

Now I'm a real beginner to all this stuff, being more at home on a good old mainframe,
but isn't it possible to drag it in from SVN at build time in the ant build script?
It makes it much easier to verify an installation & do what I started of trying to do this afternoon:
find the right sources for a particular binary.

[matinh]

Hi!

Maven would solve this problem for us: once you deploy an artifact to a repository it's there and must not be changed. Unfortunately maven is not (yet) the primary build-tool for JFreeChart and is not used at all for JCommon. I deployed JCommon 1.0.17 to Maven Central the other day. But that was just what David uploaded to sourceforge. So if the sources and binary didn't match at sourceforge, they also wouldn't match at maven central..

However, at least JFreeChart builds are perfectly reproducable, as the version in maven central won't change.

- martin

[david.gilbert]

I'm a great fan of not building ANYTHING from source!

I certainly understand where you are coming from. But you have to take certain things on trust if you don't ever want to build anything from source, and accept of some level of risk. Nevertheless, I'll try to be a good citizen and take more care to ensure consistency with future releases.

Maven would solve this problem for us: once you deploy an artifact to a repository it's there and must not be changed.

Yes, you are right. I am going to continue to upgrade my Maven knowledge.

[DaveLaw]

Wasn't meant as criticism, just a bit of friendly banter

[david.gilbert]

No issues.