Re: [recommenders-dev] [models] identification of nested jars

[Andreas Sewe <andreas.sewe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Olav,

thanks for the detailed status update.

> The /NestedJarProjectCoordinateAdvisor /provide the required
> functionality. But the question that arises is whether this is the best
> solution?

The side-effects of falling back upon the surrounding project are indeed
severe. In particular the fact that *every* dependency can now be
"identified" feels wrong to me.

And before we come up with a "solution" like per-project advisor
configuration ...

> An alternative would be to provide a better manual mapping support with
> multi selection and multi assignment to simplify the manual mapping
> process. Also an export/import functionality for the manual mappings
> could help since this would enable the sharing of manual mappings
> between users. Using the manual mappings for this special case sounds
> suitable (therefor they were introduced). I would suggest to improve the
> manual mapping configuration in the future to displace the
> /NestedJarProjectCoordinateAdvisor/ with a better fitting solution.

... I would rather improve the support for manual mappings. An "Import
manual mappings" functionality would be great, IMHO, as would the
ability to to easily assign manual mappings to a whole group of
dependencies.

Now, dependencies (of type JRE, JAR, or project) are identified by their
absolute path which is inherently non-portable across developer
machines. However, when you think about what mappings would actually
need to be exported, it's mostly JARs; Projects are very likely to have
a MANIFEST.MF or pom.xml somewhere (if not, we can always invent a
.recommenders file and write an advisor for it) and I cannot imagine why
someone would want to manually map the JRE to a different coordinate.
But for JARs storing a SHA1 fingerprint instead of the absolute path in
the exported-mappings file seems to work well ... unless the
unidentifiable JARs change frequently.

@Marcel: As you came up with this use case, can you tell us more about
the unidentifiable JARs?

Best wishes,

Andreas

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