This is not an exactly Gradle problem. But a more general build question. We have some projects structured as the following:
– A (by team 1)
– build.gradle
– settings.gradle – B (by team 1,3)
–build.gradle – C (by team 2) – D (by team 3) They are separate CVS modules. A, B and D are java projects and managed by two teams (team 1,3). C is an C++ project managed by another team (2). B use C via JNI. (The fact that C is C++ is not that important, the key is that it is developed and managed by another team.) There are two applications, A is the entrance of the application 1, A->B->C; while D is the entry point of the application 2, D->B->C. The development often involves change in all three levels. All three teams sit together and communicate constantly. In practice, we (team 1) might need some changes for application 1 in C; team 2 works on C and gives us a temporary copy; we might need some further changes after integration. We will go back and forth for several rounds for one problem. Similarly for application 2.
Currently, A,B and D are managed by various ant scripts and C by make. We started to explore new tools, in particular, Gradle. In our first cut, A includes B as a sub-project (in the Gradle sense) and they always are built and published together. We also always use the head of C (compiled ourselves from source in windows or grabed the latest Jenkin build) and when we are happy with the build, we tag all three projects. We recently adopt an internal Artifactory repository. We are thinking about how to mange the dependency and versioning. Once we finished, we will introduce it to team 3 for module D as well.
We can try to include C as a subproject for A and then always build from the scratch for all three. Similarly include C and B as subprojects for D. The application name can be in the version name for example. 2.
alternatively we can always depends on a fixed version of C in the repository. In 2, we cannot totally depends on the head/snapshot of C because that might involve their development and might be unstable. But we need their change so frequent that it seems inpractical to put a new version for every C changes.
We are wondering what is the best practice for such a setup? A quick search in internet does not yield much results. Can anyone give us some advices or point me to some books or documents?
Thank you so much.