spring-framework/gradle/jdiff/README-SPRING.txt

This distribution of JDiff 1.1.1 is included in the Spring Framework build
because JDiff has a hard requirement on a JDIFF_HOME directory containing
jdiff.jar and xerces.jar as well as other presentation resources.

The actual generation of JDiff reports is driven by the `jdiff` task declared
in build.gradle in the project root.
Introduce jdiff Gradle task The new jdiff task generates a report of API differences between the current version (i.e. the value of `version` in gradle.properties) and any older version of the framework, as specified by -DOLD_VERSION at the command line, or defaulting to `previousVersion` in gradle.properties. Running the command requires a separate clone directory pinned to the desired old version, as specified by -DOLD_VERSION_ROOT at the command line. This creates challenges from a build automation perspective, largely because Gradle doesn't (yet) have APIs for working with Git. This task may be further automated and included in nightly CI runs, but in the meantime, a number of reports back to 3.1.3.RELEASE have been generated manually and uploaded to [1], where one can now find the following entries in the directory listing: - 3.1.3.RELEASE_to_3.2.0.RC1 - 3.2.0.M1_to_3.2.0.M2 - 3.2.0.M2_to_3.2.0.RC1 - 3.2.0.RC1_to_3.2.0.BUILD-SNAPSHOT Ideally, the final entry there would be kept up-to-date on a daily basis - again we may revisit doing so in the future. Going forward, reports will be generated and uploaded manually on an as needed basis and as part of the release process. The goal of these reports are as follows: - to ease the process of ensuring backward compatibility - to aid in code reviews, particularly when reviewing large pull requests - to ease the process of creating migration guides for project maintainers, i.e. to help us remember what's changed - to allow ambitious end-users to discover what's been changing at the API level without without needing to wait for detailed "what's new in version X" and/or migration guide documentation See documentation in jdiff.gradle for usage details. Note that the jdiff-1.1.1 distribution as downloaded from [2] has been added wholesale to the source tree under gradle/jdiff instead of uploading JDiff jars to repo.springsource.org as we would normally do. This is due to some unfortunate limitations in the implementation of the jdiff ant task that require a phisical JDIFF_HOME directory. Checking in the jars and various resources represents the simplest and most pragmatic solution to this problem, though ambitious contributors are free to do what's necessary to arrive at a more elegant arrangement. [1]: http://static.springframework.org/spring-framework/docs [2]: http://sourceforge.net/projects/javadiff/files/latest/download Issue: SPR-9957 12 years ago			`This distribution of JDiff 1.1.1 is included in the Spring Framework build`
			`because JDiff has a hard requirement on a JDIFF_HOME directory containing`
			`jdiff.jar and xerces.jar as well as other presentation resources.`

			The actual generation of JDiff reports is driven by the `jdiff` task declared
			`in build.gradle in the project root.`