Glean-1.1. Order of execution of tools

[Jorge Tomé Hernando]

Hello all

I am finishing a new tool to use with Glean-1.1. The goal is to load in an external database (MySQL) the most important results of the checks we are running over the code (javancss, checkstyle, pmd). Using this info loaded in the database we are going to develop a panel of quality of code KPI's of our projects.

I need that this new tool to be run the last of all by Glean and i included this tool the last one in the "tool.pattern" variable but it seems that
Glean is running the list of tools included in the " tool.pattern" list in alphabetical order.

Is this true?, i mean, does Glean run the tools in alphabetical order instead of obeying the order in the "tool.pattern" variable?

Thanks for your help
--
Jorge Tomé Hernando

http://www.jorgetome.info
Linux Registered User #362778

[Jorge Tomé Hernando]

Hello all, I'm me again :-)

2007/8/31, Jorge Tomé Hernando <jtom...@gmail.com>:

Is this true?, i mean, does Glean run the tools in alphabetical order instead of obeying the order in the "tool.pattern" variable?

I have investigate a little and i have found that the subant ant task[1] that glean uses in the main build.xml file in the way Glean is using has the following restriction (extracted from the subant task documentation)...

Note that the directories will be added to the build path in no particular order, so if order is significant, one should use a file list instead!

I think I will have to modify the build.xml in order to ensure that the tools are launched exactly in the same order of the tool.pattern variable. Someone can help me with this?

Thanks a lot in advance

[1] http://ant.apache.org/manual/CoreTasks/subant.html

[John Brugge]

Jorge,

Yes, the unordered nature of the dirset input to subant is a nuisance for some of the tools. While most of the tools don't depend on any ordering, there are two so far that have: qalab, and dashboard. For qalab, I've relied on the current state of affairs that seems to order the dirset elements in alphabetical order, and been lucky that none of the tools that qalab draws data from has a name that comes after "q" - like it says, there is no guaranteed order, but that is how it appears to be implemented.

For dashboard, I didn't see an easy away around it so I made a hack: I added a special property to turn on/off of running it, and added a special target that would run the dashboard after everything else. The dashboard seemed like a special enough tool that I didn't feel too bad about it, but I'd still like to think there is a better way.

Perhaps we could have a separate category of tools, of aggregators such as this, and if there is no special ordering among them, we could just have two tiers of unordered tools: the collection tools run first, the aggregator tools run second. I've been playing with XRadar recently and am thinking that would be a valuable tool to include as well, but it falls in to the same category: a tool that has to run after all of the other collectors.

So do you think that would make sense, to have a second pattern of tools listing ones such as yours, qalab and dashboard?

John