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It's way more than that. It bundles a lot of jars --- building those from source, recursively, is a big task. (I tried building Bazel and its dependencies com

• oblio 9y ago
  I think any big Java app is a mess for distributions. They usually include a ton of jars, since they just get them "for free" when using Maven/Gradle/Ivy. Building the jars should be trivial in theory (especially for Maven), but the different between theory and practice is smaller in theory than in practice :)
  • rekado 9y ago
    Yeah, a lot of Java things require extensive patching to cut dependency cycles or to make the code compile with the current JDK. Say what you want about Autotools, but at least the user won't have to install Autotools to build the software. A build tool that depends on Java and dozens of Java libraries that have dozens of dependencies of their own, each with their own set of bootstrapping problems ... it's a tough sell.
    • oblio 9y ago
      True, but as someone who has been part of that ecosystem: your standard Java developer doesn't rebuild everything. They don't want, need or have to do it. The Maven repo is immutable and very reliable. So everybody builds on top of the binaries. Of course, there's this implicit system of trust, which might be misguided, but there's many billion dollar companies built on top of it.