[Chandler-dev] 0.14 Hub Update

[Travis Vachon]

Hi folks

I've run into a snag with updating http://hub.chandlerproject.org to  
0.14 and wanted to send a short summary and proposed remedy to this  
list before moving forward.

It seems that something environmental is causing the Dojo build to  
hang (apparently) indefinitely during its "string interning" phase, in  
which HTML files are packed into Javascript strings. My current best  
guess is that this is a result of using the JRockit VM for the build,  
something not particularly well tested or supported by the Dojo  
developers. I see three possible solutions:

1) Continue to debug the problem, attempting to discover why the build  
hangs in this environment.
2) Install a new VM, specifically the Sun JVM, which is well supported  
(this is currently the solution we're using on the lab instances).
3) Discontinue our current practice of producing a Hub-local  
Javascript JAR, instead pulling from the OSAF Maven repos.

In the past I believe we've avoided option 3 due to confusion  
surrounding the deployment of of Javascript JARs to our Maven repo,  
but with the smaller corps of active developers (and specifically  
developers pushing JS JARs to our repo) I'm more comfortable with  
doing that now. As a result, this is the option I'm leaning toward.

I remain somewhat concerned that our build/release process is somewhat  
prone to errors like the ones that made us originally choose to do the  
Dojo builds locally on Hub, and I'd like to follow up by proposing  
some infrastructure research and work to rectify this. I'll follow up  
on the cosmo-dev list with that proposal, as it's likely to be a more  
technical discussion focused on the server build process, so make sure  
to subscribe there if you have any interest in participating.

Any thoughts? Comments? Concerns?

If I don't hear anything by eod today I'll move ahead with this plan,  
probably some time this weekend to minimize impact on users.

-Travis