Mavenisation of forester

[josemduarte]

At BioJava we are using the forester library within the biojava-phylo module. It's all working great with forester, except for the dependency management. We use maven (as many people these days in the java world) but forester does not exist in maven central. In the past we've solved this by publishing a forester artifact under the org.biojava.thirdparty group, but that required some manual work. We now need to update to version 1.038 of forester (see biojava/biojava#350) so we are going to go through the process of publishing to maven again.

To avoid some of that work for the future I'm considering submitting a pull request to mavenise forester. Would that be a welcome solution? It would require some reorganisation of the project so that it follows the maven layout convention (java code under src/main/java, java-related resources under src/main/resources, testing java code under src/test/java).

[sbliven]

@josemduarte The issue here isn't really what build system forester uses (ant or maven). The problem is that we maven users would like to have forester in maven central, so that we can automatically pull it as a dependency. Thus, the question is really who should be responsible for pushing new versions. The options are

1. BioJava people stay as maintainers. Forester is uploaded using the BioJava code signature under the org.biojava.thirdparty groupId. Forester devs are uninvolved.
2. Someone with push access to this repository starts releasing to maven central. This could be either @cmzmasek or one of us if he trusts us to directly commit and make releases. Probably forester would use its own groupId and signing keys.

Both options are possible with either ant or maven, but both would be easier if forester switched to maven. The second option is the officially preferred way, but it would require more work initially.

[josemduarte]

Thanks @sbliven . I understand the main issue is pushing the jar to maven central. I simply thought mavenization would make things easier and would allow for a more automated way to publish to maven central. In my fork I've already made some progress and got the project mavenized. I'll submit a pull request as soon as I can check that everything is alright.

[ianmcorvidae]

+1 to this. We're also using forester via maven at CyVerse (formerly iPlant Collaborative), and we've had to switch to using biojava's thirdparty copy of forester in sonatype OSS releases repository to get our stuff to build: https://github.com/cyverse/DE/blob/919d2d21d2cc1c9aa42b655b7a22c8844ea7ede7/services/terrain/project.clj#L34

[josemduarte]

Happy that it helps. You can use now version 1.038 which contains some important bug fixes, see the biojava pom: https://github.com/biojava/biojava/blob/master/pom.xml#L439