How to support multiple Scala versions in a library

Question

I have a fairly normal Scala project currently being built using Maven. I would like to support both Scala 2.9.x and the forthcoming 2.10, which is not binary or source compatible. I am willing to entertain converting to SBT if necessary, but I have run into some challenges.

My requirements for this project are:

• Single source tree (no branching). I believe that trying to support multiple concurrent "master" branches for each Scala version will be the quickest way to miss bugfixes between the branches.

• Version specific source directories. Since the Scala versions are not source compatibile, I need to be able to specify an auxiliary source directory for version specific sources.

• Version specific source jars. End users should be able to download the correct source jar, with the correct version specific sources, for their version of Scala for IDE integration.

• Integrated deployment. I currently use the Maven release plugin to deploy new versions to the Sonatype OSS repository, and would like to have a similarly simple workflow for releases.

• End-user Maven support. My end users are often Maven users, and so a functional POM that accurately reflects dependencies is critical.

• Shaded jar support. I need to be able to produce a JAR that includes a subset of my dependenices and removes the shaded dependencies from the published POM.

Things I have tried:

• Maven profiles. I created a set of Maven profiles to control what version of Scala is used to build, using the Maven build-helper plugin to select the version specific source tree. This was working well until it came time to publish;

  • Using classifiers to qualify versions doesn't work well, because the source jars would also need custom classifiers ('source-2.9.2', etc.), and most IDE tools wouldn't know how to locate them.

  • I tried using a Maven property to add the SBT-style _${scala.version} suffix to the artifact name, but Maven does not like properties in the artifact name.

• SBT. This works well once you can grok it (no small task despite extensive documentation). The downside is that there does not seem to be an equivalent to the Maven shade plugin. I've looked at:

  • Proguard. The plugin is not updated for SBT 0.12.x, and won't build from source because it depends on another SBT plugin that has changed groupIds, and doesn't have a 0.12.x version under the old name. I have not yet been able to work out how to instruct SBT to ignore/replace the plugin dependency.

  • OneJar. This uses custom class loading to run Main classes out of embedded jars, which is not the desired result; I want the class files of my project to be in the jar along with (possibly renamed) class files from my shaded dependencies.

  • SBT Assembly plugin. This can work to a degree, but the POM file appears to include the dependencies that I'm trying to shade, which doesn't help my end users.

I accept that there may not be a solution that does what I want for Scala, and/or I may need to write my own Maven or Scala plugins to accomplish the goal. But if I can I'd like to find an existing solution.

Update

I am close to accepting @Jon-Ander's excellent answer, but there is still one outstanding piece for me, which is a unified release process. The current state of my build.sbt is on GitHub. (I'll reproduce it here in an answer later for posterity).

The sbt-release plugin does not support multi-version builds (i.e., + release does not behave as one might like), which makes a sort of sense as the process of release tagging doesn't really need to happen across versions. But I would like two parts of the process to be multi-version: testing and publishing.

What I'd like to have happen is something akin to two-stage maven-release-plugin process. The first stage would do the administrative work of updating Git and running the tests, which in this case would mean running + test so that all versions are tested, tagging, updating to snapshot, and then pushing the result to upstream.

The second stage would checkout the tagged version and + publish, which will rerun the tests and push the tagged versions up to the Sonatype repository.

I suspect that I could write releaseProcess values that do each of these, but I'm not sure if I can support multiple releaseProcess values in my build.sbt. It probably can work with some additional scopes, but that part of SBT is still strange majick to me.

What I currently have done is changed the releaseProcess to not publish. I then have to checkout the tagged version by hand and run + publish after the fact, which is close to what I want but does compromise, especially since the tests are only run on the current scala version in the release process. I could live with a process that isn't two-stage like the maven plugin, but does implement multi-version test and publish.

Any additional feedback that can get me across the last mile would be appreciated.

Answer 1

Most of this is well supported in sbt within a single source tree

Version specific source directories are usually not need. Scala programs tends to be source compatible - so often in fact that crossbuilding (http://www.scala-sbt.org/release/docs/Detailed-Topics/Cross-Build) has first class support in sbt.

If you really need version specific code, you can add extra source folders. Putting this in your build.sbt file will add "src/main/scala-[scalaVersion]" as a source directory for each version as you crossbuild in addition to the regular "src/main/scala". (there is also a plugin available for generating shims between version, but I haven't tried it - https://github.com/sbt/sbt-scalashim)

unmanagedSourceDirectories in Compile <+= (sourceDirectory in Compile, scalaVersion){ (s,v) => s / ("scala-"+v) }

version specific source jars - see crossbuilding, works out of the box

integrated deployment - https://github.com/sbt/sbt-release (has awesome git integration too)

Maven end-users - http://www.scala-sbt.org/release/docs/Detailed-Topics/Publishing.html

Shaded - I have used this one https://github.com/sbt/sbt-assembly which have worked fine for my needs. Your problem with the assembly plugin can be solved by rewriting the generated pom. Here is an example ripping out joda-time.

pomPostProcess := {
    import xml.transform._
    new RuleTransformer(new RewriteRule{
        override def transform(node:xml.Node) = {
            if((node \ "groupId").text == "joda-time") xml.NodeSeq.Empty else node
        }
    })
}

Complete build.sbt for for reference

scalaVersion := "2.9.2"

crossScalaVersions := Seq("2.9.2", "2.10.0-RC5")

unmanagedSourceDirectories in Compile <+= (sourceDirectory in Compile, scalaVersion){ (s,v) => s / ("scala-"+v) }

libraryDependencies += "joda-time" % "joda-time" % "1.6.2"

libraryDependencies += "org.mindrot" % "jbcrypt" % "0.3m"

pomPostProcess := {
    import xml.transform._
    new RuleTransformer(new RewriteRule{
        override def transform(node:xml.Node) = {
            if((node \ "groupId").text == "joda-time") xml.NodeSeq.Empty else node
        }
    })
}

Answer 2

I've done something similar to this with SBT as an example: https://github.com/seanparsons/scalaz/commit/21298eb4af80f107181bfd09eaaa51c9b56bdc28

It's made possible by SBT allowing all the settings to be determined based on other settings, which means that most other things should "just work".

As far as the pom.xml aspect I can only recommend asking the question in the SBT mailing list, I would be surprised if you couldn't do that however.

Answer 3

My blog post http://www.day-to-day-stuff.blogspot.nl/2013/04/fixing-code-and-binary.html contains an example of a slightly more finegrained solution for attaching different source directories; one per major S. Also it explains how to create scala-version-specific code that can be used by not-specific code.

Update 2016-11-08: Sbt now supports this out of the box: http://www.scala-sbt.org/0.13/docs/sbt-0.13-Tech-Previews.html#Cross-version+support+for+Scala+sources