[antlr-interest] Building ANTLR v3.2 from source.

[Peter C. Chapin]

Greetings!

I have this idea that I would try to add support to ANTLR for a new
target language (specifically Ada 2005). I'm not sure if this effort
will amount to anything or not, but I amused myself for a while this
evening by looking at the problem. According to what is says here

http://www.antlr.org/wiki/display/ANTLR3/How+to+build+an+ANTLR+code
+generation+target

I got the impression I needed to be working inside a copy of ANTLR's
source code. Accordingly I downloaded the source distribution for ANTLR
3.2 and unpacked it. Seeing that Maven was required for the build I
downloaded and installed Maven 2.2.1 (I'm new to Maven, by the way).

Looking at the BUILD.txt file in the root of the source distribution I
tried running Maven directly at that level using the command


mvn -Dmaven.test.skip=true


Maven downloaded all sorts of goodies from various places and then I got
the following nasty result:


[INFO] Scanning for projects...                              
[INFO] Reactor build order:                                  
[INFO]   ANTLR Master build control POM                      
[INFO]   Antlr 3 Runtime                                     
[INFO]   ANTLR Grammar Tool                                  
[INFO]   Maven plugin for ANTLR V3                           
[INFO]   ANTLR gUnit                                         
[INFO]   Maven plugin for gUnit ANTLR V3                     
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Building ANTLR Master build control POM                                 
[INFO]    task-segment: [install]                                              
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] [buildnumber:create {execution: default}]                               
[INFO] Storing buildNumber: Mar 12, 2010 22:16:44 at timestamp: 1268450204341  
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[ERROR] FATAL ERROR                                                            
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] The scm url cannot be null.                                             
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Trace
java.lang.NullPointerException: The scm url cannot be null.


I tried a couple of variations such as running Maven in other locations.
I also tried the command


mvn -N install


at the top level. All of these commands produced essentially the same
result: A java.lang.NullPointerException with the message "The scm url
cannot be null."

I'm not sure what this means to me. I notice in the BUILD.txt file
references to the Perforce SCM system. I'm actually familiar with
Perforce (I use it with another project). Do I need to do something with
that? Is it possible for just anyone to read the ANTLR Perforce depot?
It might be nice in any case to follow the latest and greatest changes
as they happen.

Thanks for any advice you can give!

Peter