Releasing Using Gradle

BOF session on Monday 30th June at 5:30pm

The Problem

Legacy software that uses a custom set of Ant scripts to build multiple applications from a dozen or so modules each, some shared
Build system uses a system of "manifests" to identify versions of modules and builds EVERYTHING from source (in CVS)
Builds take a long time; no CI; inconsistencies creep in between module versions included in different applications; third-party libraries not up to date
Successfully introduced Gradle as a substitute for Ant; dependency and version management now much cleaner
Started developing some new modules and storing them in git instead of CVS (the intention is eventually to move from CVS to git for all)
BUT: cutting a release is now a laborious process, as we have to trace all snapshot dependencies first and freeze them

Investigate use of Ivy to manage dependencies
Assemblertasks.gradle contains a dependencies block that amounts to a manifest - extract this to a new file e.g. manifest.gradle
Create a script that generates the manifest automatically from latest versions of each dependency
Create a script that creates a release branch
Create a script that visits each module in the manifest and if its latest version is a snapshot, creates the corresponding release version on the release branch
Each module needs to be built on the release branch at a fixed version
The artifact version can be fed into each build.gradle using a parameter or by running a script to extract the latest tag from module.info - this obviates the need to modify build.gradle to move from snapshot to release to next snapshot version