Gang, What is the purpose of the binary distribution? From ASF's point of view, it is nothing more than "convenience" and we are not required to distribute it. Which raises the question, What is convenient for Polygene developers?
1. Maven Central - absolutely convenient 2. Offline development by receiving a full Maven repository, installable locally or on an in-premise repository, such as Nexus. 3. Tools that 'just works' So, for 1, there is no debate, we have that covered. The current binary only contains org.apache.polygene artifacts, none of the dependencies, so 2 is a hybrid of "get everything from us, but you need everything else from Maven Central". So what's the point. I don't think the current binary provides that "offline" convenience at all. And we currently don't have any tools that justifies a binary tarball. It feels 'empty'. Although the full documentation is cool, we have versioned documentation online, which is cooler. And question is also, how do we provide the polygene yeoman generator to make it neat. One drastic idea, since people like to download bin distros, just put inside a README with install instructions of the polygene yeoman generator, and nothing else. I think I am on the brink of; Let's not distribute -bin until we have more executable tools (model viewer for instance). We also save some headache on what needs to go into NOTICE and LICENSE files. Opinions? Cheers -- Niclas Hedhman, Software Developer http://polygene.apache.org - New Energy for Java
