Allow Module Development without Zorba Sources

[David Graf]

As far as I see it correctly, module development can currently not be done without checking out zorba sources and compiling it. One reason are the module dependencies
E.g. the following dependency in the http-client module works only, if the data converter sources are available:
FIND_PACKAGE(zorba_data-converters_module REQUIRED
  HINTS ${DATA_CONVERTERS_BUILD_DIR})

And testing seems to be possible only if the build directory of zorba is available.

Would be nice if those two things (defining module dependencies and writing/executing tests for a module) were possible with the Zorba installation. I should not be necessary to compile zorba to hack a new module.

Chris, I assigned the bug to you because I know you are the master of this stuff. You might have comments on this. Thanks in advance!

[Chris Hillery (ceejatec)]

It is absolutely the goal that module developers should be able to work against a binary installation of Zorba, and I know that it actually did work at some point in time. I certainly took some pains to make that use case functional when developing the initial non-core module architecture. In particular, I am sure that at some point it was possible to build a non-core module AND run its tests without needing a Zorba build directory.

David, have you actually tried it? Follow the instructions from our documentation:

http://www.zorba-xquery.com/html/documentation/2.1.0/zorba/modules_authoring

starting with the "Creating a CMake Module Project" section.

That said, a lot has changed since I last tried it, and I don't think anybody is actually doing development in that fashion. So it wouldn't surprise me to find out that this is currently broken. Also, the particular case of inter-module dependencies is one that has never worked very well, so it may well be that that doesn't work even if simpler modules do. So, I'll take this bug as a reason to check out the current situation and see if there are things to improve.