Hi, On Thu, May 31, 2012 at 12:01 AM, Alex Harui <[email protected]> wrote: > ...Carol and I are trying to make sense of the rules for binary files at > Apache. It is my > current understanding that there are slightly different rules for what can go > in SVN vs in a release....
Yes - a release consists of source code only, but it's ok in some cases to have binaries in svn (though one should ask if that's really needed). > > My current understanding is that we can keep binary files in SVN. You can > have a “deps” folder with JARs > and other libraries you are dependent on... That's possible but using a dependency management tool (Maven or the equivalent for ant, ivy?) is much better IMO. > But can you: > A. have test media that is compiled output of proprietary tools? Flex > allows use of PixelBender > bitmap filters which are compiled using the Adobe PixelBender toolkit... We cannot release such files. Having them in svn might be ok but I'd also put them in a distinct "deps" or "test-deps" folder. >...B. have source files that are not plain text? There are a few FLA files >from Adobe Flash > that will be used for optional utility programs.... Binary files created with a proprietary tool? Looks like the same as A. to me, cannot release those. > > My current understanding is that a source release cannot contain binary > files.. Correct. > ...Yet in the Batik and Velocity source distributions there is a folder of > JAR files and > I don’t see any option to build those JARs from source. Other notes indicate > that > downstream releases should build from sources of upstream releases. Again > Batik and Velocity don’t seem to be doing this.... >...C. Can our source release build script leverage JARs or must it build >everything from sources?... Most Apache projects written in Java use Maven builds, which by default get their dependencies from a central repository that we do not control. But users can relatively easily replace that with their own repository, and in theory they can build all dependencies themselves before adding them to their local repository. Having a similar setup for Flex would be ok IMO: download binaries from trusted sources by default, but allow people to supply their own binaries if they want. HTH, -Bertrand
