It is my stated intent to do away with the need to hand edit a batch file or shell script or the like. All I ask is that each project remain completely buildable from source.
What my Alexandria/Gump proposal does is exactly that. Given a small project definition file (in XML), possibly combined with other project definitions into a workspace, a batch file (and ultimately a shell script, a perl script, or even an Ant build definition) will be produced for you. A bootstrap.java is an excellent idea. If nobody else has time, I will volunteer to do the work to put this into a 1.x release. I will look to the current release manager to detemine the appropriate timing for this activity (i.e., should this go into 1.3 or post 1.3?). - Sam Ruby
