Re: help - multiple location of commons releases

[Mark R. Diggory]

Henri Yandell wrote:

On Thu, 13 Feb 2003, Jeffrey Dever wrote:

And speaking of releases, why in commons do we have two packages for
each release, one for source and one for binaries?  These are small
components where the biggest thing about them is the generated javadoc
which is in both.  I find that people usually download the binary drop
and then ask on the mailing list "where is the example code?" which is
of course in the source package.

Can't we just release one package with everything in it?  In general the
only thing that makes a binary a binary is that it has a packaged jar
file which is small anyway compared to the source and documentation.

My vote would be for a distribution build, and a jar. Both downloadable.
Most of the time I come looking for just the jar, and have to grab lots of
other things. Sometimes I want the docs, but mainly it is the jar.

I think most people who are using tools like ant or maven get the benifit of being able to download dependencies in jar form to be stored in their repositories/libraries. Having jars available via the web is integral to automating the process of building tools that are dependent on other projects.

I regularly use the ibiblio repository to get copies of the various apache packages I require, making my distributions much smaller overall by not having to distribute the jars in my tar/zip archives.

Having jars makes it possible to distribute a much smaller package with build script capable of getting the required jars from the site. Plus, if a user already has installed a package, the script can detect it and not download the jars for that package. Optimizing on two different fronts 1.) the size of my distribution 2.) reducing duplicate jar files on my users machines.

So, having Jars is a big +1 in my opinion

Is there any need to support both tar.gz and .zip? With the exception of
some minor pain on Apple machines for tar.gz [although I've never had this
myself], it seems we could ditch one of these distribution mechanisms.

Hen

These days, most Windows tools that support zip also support tar.gz. Most linux/unix distributions support both zip and tar. I'm not sure about apple's capabilities when it comes to zip.

-Mark


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