Git operations while building source release

[JamesC1]

I'm on some rebuild of Ubuntu LTS,and want junit for something unrelated. When we're done here, I'll download the source with git, like everyone else, and see how far I get. If there's a table of which versions of junit are supported with which versions of java, tht could be useful.

I have downloaded the .tar.gz source release of junit-framework-r5.13.4. Following these build instructions:
https://github.com/junit-team/junit-framework/blob/ebb561acdc79db2c26210c3bd059f349a59d1750/README.md#building-from-source
it fails quite early, apparently by doing git operations on the source release, when the source release is not a git repository. Please find some logs and my analysis so far attached.

So the question is: is there a supported way to build from the source release?

As regards preferences, I am from an earlier generation of computing, and would like to be able to build software so that, when it needs more tools, it stops to give me instructions, rather than silently
downloading things. I suspect that this horse has bolted.

git-fail-03.txt

[mpkorstanje]

So the question is: is there a supported way to build from the source release?

Information from Git is used in the build. So ostensibly you'd have to use Git and clone the repository to build it. But what is the reason you want to build from the released Github sources rather than by cloning with Git?

• If you are working a hermetic environment with strict requirements on software provenance then a feature request to allow the build scripts to work from the released Github sources would be the most productive route to go.

• If you want to verify authenticity of the artifacts you download from Maven central, the artifacts are signed with a private key. See: https://github.com/junit-team/junit-framework/blob/main/SECURITY.md#jar-signing

• If you want to verify the reproducibility of the build you'll have to clone from git as the build contains information from git. Though you could also defer to the reproducible builds project: https://github.com/jvm-repo-rebuild/reproducible-central/blob/master/content/org/junit/junit5/README.md

• If it is just "because", you can probably patch out the code that interacts with git and set buildRevision to some other value and get it over with.

[JamesC1]

It's not hermetic environment. I have gone on to clone the git, build and use the software.

It's a mixture of trust, reproducibility and "because". I interpreted the existence of a source release as implying that the source release is sufficient to have the software live beyond the hosting platform.

Yours to decide whether the feature request should be raised. If so, it should include updating the build instructions and possibly the procedure for extracting a source release from github.

[mpkorstanje]

Yours to decide whether the feature request should be raised.

For clarity, I'm not part of the JUnit team. I just contribute occasionally.