Design a publish / deploy story

[damienmg]

We should be able to provide easy way to deploy / publish artifacts. That include publish to artifactory / maven central, push to GCR or GCS, Android Play Store and so on...

We should also think of release process.

The order of priority:

• Artifactory / Maven central is requested by several people including the Gerrit team and Twitter heron (Update release process to include how to tag, build and publish artifacts apache/incubator-heron#893)
• GCR / GCS for ci.bazel.io
• Others.

[damienmg]

Internal ref: b/25764843

[ronshapiro]

The dagger team is also very interested in this, because the Maven Android plugin doesn't suit our needs and we'd rather switch to bazel than gradle. Can you let me and/or @gk5885 know if there's anything we can do to help?

[damienmg]

Getting further in the though process.

For GCR for ci.bazel.io, we actually moved to use a run rules that calls gcloud docker push, and we do bazel run //gcr:deploy. That works pretty well so I think there is no Bazel side update to the story (but I may be wrong).

The only topic left right now would then be to implement a maven_deploy rules that would be able to talk to artifactory or maven central. @ronshapiro: wdyt?

[ittaiz]

@damienmg is 0.5 realistic? any chance to see a deploy story for maven jars landing this release?

[ronshapiro]

The actual maven_deploy logic would be nice, but simple enough to implement on your own since they're just HTTP PUT calls. I think the more interesting side of the deployment process is the packaging and creating of a maven pom.xml. I have a rough-and-dirty script which parses the WORKSPACE file for artifacts and then scans the deps+exports lists of our deps in Dagger, and then omits deps tagged "compile_time_dep". But it's still very much patchy. I'll post here when I sync that first version externally to github.com/google/dagger.

[damienmg]

@ittaiz I don't think we can do it by 0.5 moved to 0.6. But the design should be pretty straightforward as @ronshapiro described.

[ittaiz]

Fair enough. I suspected as such as didn't see any activity about it on bazel-dev.
@ronshapiro do you have any estimate when you'll have that first very rough version synced?

[johnynek]

I'm pretty skeptical publishing will be very easy.

Pants has actually tackled this quite a bit. The issue is: each internal node in the graph needs to be given a maven coordinate, or you need to somehow do some combining. Combining is really tough because future changes in the build graph could invalidate the clustering.

I guess you could do a naive thing and make one groupid for the whole repo, then publish every target as a separate artifact and everything gets one version, but you might not want to publish everything.

For small repos, it is probably easy, for big repos, not so sure.

pants at least, I think, gets this reasonable right:
http://www.pantsbuild.org/publish.html