Cross project dependencies resolution
Evgeny Minkevich
Good day.
Firstly I would like to mention that we are using PDI-EE only.
Recently I had to take action on expediting the resolution of http://jira.pentaho.com/browse/PDI-10657 - Upgrade to business rules engine v 5.5. from a five year old 5.0. The 5.5 version is not the latest one generally - it is the last release in the 5.x branch. I have settled on it as it did not require changes to the dependency set beyond what is used by DROOLS engine itself. The latest DROOLS is 6.0.1.
The case was not hard at all - just one required change to the source code, a few library upgrades and a convenience addition to one of the classes.
I have scanned the kettle dependency tree and the codebase to the best of my understanding - no further references to mvel, jdt or drools have been found.
Which resulted in a pull request https://github.com/pentaho/pentaho-kettle/pull/205
Later on the pull request have been merged in.
This morning I got notification that it had been reverted with the following comment:
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There was downstream issues w/ extensions and a modeler project.
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Pull request: https://github.com/pentaho/pentaho-kettle/pull/237
In that regard I have a few questions.
- Resolution options
How should I go ahead with the PDI-10657 resolution? I have a case through Pentaho support, the issue have been sitting there for some time and the fix that I thought should be sufficient turned out to be troublesome.
As we are not using modeler - so I do not have any understanding of the project - should I still go ahead and try to fix it?
- General development
Is there a dependency chart somewhere that would list mandatory downstream dependencies that I should take into account when suggesting such changes(and testing them)?
- Ivy dependency tree generation
It was not able to find an easy way to generate the ivy dependency tree for the project - is there one? That would be handy with the projects I do not have understanding of.
- Dependency failure details
What is the right channel to request the detailed list of the downstream issues so I can have a look at them and try to resolve?
I tried to quickly check if the modeler project references drools, mvel or jdt explicitly from within the code - it seems it does not - so I am a bit puzzled as to what exactly caused the rollback.
A case of JAR Hell? But is it right to have such a cross component dependency?
- Organizational structure
Again I'm not 100% sure how modeler comes into play with the whole Pentaho offering.
But if it mandates the rollback of a change to another component (PDI) - wouldn't it be beneficial to bundle it with that product (or BI suite if it is used there) or to exclude PDI from the transitive dependency all together?
So any issues are to be resolved would be contained to just one project?
Again - I would like to make this change go through - what is the right way to go about fixing cross module dependencies?