As an ArgoUML contributor I'm going to blog my activities here, so that they may draw interest by other developers or help other developers when doing tasks similar to what I've done. AND(!) the grand vision that makes an Argonaut what he is, TO THRIVE IN THE BIG DANGEROUS WORLD, TAKING THE Argo TO A GOOD SHORE ;-))

Saturday, March 08, 2008

ArgoUML's repository restructuring

ArgoUML core is undertaking a repository restructuring and I'm working in adapting the argouml-cpp build to the new structure.Issue 4625 is where the requirements for the changes are documented and there has been some dev mailing list activity on this. Linus Tolke is heading the effort.

We want to keep two build mechanisms:

  • Plain Ant build via command line and without eclipse.
  • eclipse based build, being the idea for this to make easier for new contributors to start.

I have been adapting the Ant build file to the new structure, but, I had some problems with making it work for both purposes. The big issue is to generate the source files from the ANTLR grammar. In the end we figured out a good way to do it and it is now documented in the ArgoUML cookbook.

Distributed version control systems

Recently I had to use Mercurial to checkout the NetBeans sources. Well, since the instructions were for the whole NetBeans repository, I followed them and I have a local checkout of it. Now NetBeans is big, so, you could think it would take me some hours to get the whole thing, even more, if you consider that it clones the whole repository with the full history. No, it was surprisingly fast and its command line interface is very easy to use.

Alas, I have currently no project where this or other distributed SCMs are used, but, when I get a break from ArgoUML and start experimenting with open source projects from common-lisp.net I'll have a good change that they'll be darcs based.

Debugging model-mdr

In the past 2 months I have been in and out working with other persons to fix the problems in the ArgoUML's subsystem model-mdr (see issue #4946). This is a core part of the ArgoUML implementation and it basically wraps NetBeans MDR into an implementation of the ArgoUML model subsystem.

MDR is based in JMI (a standard from the Java Community Process), which is itself based in MOF (a standard from OMG). I was more or less familiar with the ideas behind MOF, but, as always, the devil is in the details and I'm now reading the standard so that I'm not bumping so much on problems.

My lack of knowledge about MOF was made worse by the sources of the several jars from MDR not being included in the ArgoUML repository. Also, unusual for open source projects MDR doesn't make it available as a download - you must checkout the sources with Mercurial (more on this latter) or CVS. Even so, it doesn't contain the sources for jmi.jar and mof.jar. The MOF and JMI standards don't have a zipped javadoc to help when you bump into unexpected problems in the debugger. All this is making the whole exercise harder than needed!

TODO: get my hands on the jmi.jar and mof.jar sources!

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