Observations on a first time build

Just started working with jnode and got my build going last night and I thought I'd document some of my experiences as a point of reference for others that are attempting to do the same thing.

I would say that some of the biggest issues I encountered were centered around the fact that documentation has stagnated a little bit.

An example being the initial page on how to obtain the sources http://www.jnode.org/node/2976 which mentions that codebase has moved to github, the link on the page then leads you to more documentation on how interact with git http://www.jnode.org/node/2976 which is pointing to repository that isn't github and that hasn't been updated since 2009

So I obtained a clone of the github repository and pulled it into my eclipse. I was then immediately confronted with build errors that stated I was missing a classes.jar file in the all/lib directory. This file was removed back in 2009 and is actually pulled into the project as part of the ant target prepare which ftps the file from some other site. Getting this to pull was an additional trick as the build.xml was set to reference the ant-contrib.jar that provides some additional ant related functionality. However that jar file has to be manually installed and configured in eclipses' ANT build path. Neither of these particular hurdles were documented as far as I could tell.

Once I got the ant-contrib installed and the initial build ran then everything started working smoothly.

As a new, interested, user/developer. I think an update to the documentation would help a lot with getting people up and running. If this is a task I could take on I don't mind volunteering.

Additionally I've seen many open source projects include a documentation site as part of the repository, This has benefits that documentation can be updated in the same manner as a code change and would allow a larger number of people to contribute. I could certainly do that task as well.

-Jason