We need a 'build' process, but not necessarily a 'compilation' process.
We could have a distribution that includes all of the jar files ready compiled. Then, when the user has unpacked this distribution, they edit their local.blocks.properties, etc, and run build, which prepares the webapp, copying only those precompiled jars across that are actually needed, and running the XConfPatch task, etc, etc.
So nice this sounds, so bad it can be for the users. They might select blocks missing their dependencies (because we have not maintained them correctly, or they did a mistake when selecting them) and got NoClassDefFoundError at run time.
Joerg
