Today I was maintaining some code that one of my co-workers wrote over a year ago. Unfortunately he is longer here. Everything went fine until I had to recompile an RMI generated class.
When I compared the previous class to the one generated from my code it was very different and I couldn't explain the differences. Aftere tinkering with the options I turned off 1.1 compatibility and the differences became understandable. Unfortunately this generated file had been checked into CVS but the method by which it was generated was not in the build process. Thus we had no memory of what options to use should we have to rebuild it again.
The moral is that the build script as well as making your life easier is also a document describing how to build the project from scratch.
In my case today fixing the option was trivial but if something more complicated had been checked in I would have been in trouble.
Posted by stuartcw at November 25, 2002 12:58 PM