mernst
commented
8 years ago Thanks for the suggestions. Having Maven do all the downloading of the Checker Framework is more idiomatic, so that is a good idea. Thanks! The same goes for Gradle. I'm not sure it fits as well with Ant, though.
What is the purpose of the checker-qual dependency? Is it used anywhere?
We have users who use JDK 7, so the instructions should indicate how to do that as well. Luckily, it's only a small change from what you have proposed.
Would it be possible to write your instructions as a diff to the manual? In particular, it would be nice to have explicit indications of where each of the XML snippets goes -- in what file and where in the file. A pull request would be delightful, but we could also continue the conversation here in the issue.
renatoathaydes
pdurbin
atomicknight
jefferyyuan
Hi. I submitted a few issues I had working with the checker framework, mostly due to the fact I was trying to avoid using the annotated JDK. The main reason for that was that I could not accept adding a system dependency (to a file somewhere in the local machine) or adding the jar to my source control to be able to refer to the annotated JDK jar.
After much trouble, I've come to a good solution that lets Maven take care of finding the jar and providing it to the checker framework.
I submit this issue as a request to add this to the documentation as the preferred way to use checker in Maven (similar approaches should work in Ant and Gradle).
First of all, to enable the checker framework, I simply add it as an annotation processor in the pom. This is done in the declaration of the
maven-compiler-plugin. Then, I just add some compiler arguments that get passed to the NullnessChecker, like the location of my stubs (to annotate library methods), and importantly, the location of the annotated JDK in a system-independent, no setup way (Maven will download the jdk jar and figure out its location):Notice that the location of the annotated JDK8 comes from the
annotatedJdk8property, which we have not yet set. To set it, two things need to be added to the pom:maven-dependency-pluginto execute thepropertiesgoal, which will set the above property to the right value:Then, of course, we need to make the jdk jar a dependency in the pom:
This approach requires absolutely no setup in any machine where this build is run to make checker framework work.
It works best if all this configuration is done in a Maven profile, so that it's still possible to compile the code without running the checker framework. In this case, the dependencies above, as well as the maven-compiler-plugin dependency should be added inside the profile declaration... and optionally, the annotations in the Java code could come from a jar which contains only the
javax.annotationannotations (eg.javax.annotation.Nullable), such asfindbugs, to completely un-couple the compilation to the checker-framework: