"Geir Magnusson Jr." wrote:
> The motivation here is to lower the cost of entry for someone wandering
> by - if you can just grab something, build it, then I think we have a
> chance of hooking someone with this open source thing....
"Geir Magnusson Jr." wrote:
> My motivation is to lower the barrier to entry so a user can grab a
> tarball or zip that is the current state of the project, start the build
> process. I don't think they should be forced to alter their classpath,
> or alter the executable path, or download lots of stuff.
I think we should focus on making the build process flexible, and let
"users" start with binary releases.
If they want to get under the hood, they should be ready to get their
hands dirty, and meet all the prerequisites.
I do agree that we need to make it brain-dead easy for a "user" to come
along, check out what we are doing, toss a JAR in their classpath, and
go to town.
But I don't think we should be trying to serve "users", "power users
dabbling in development", and "real developers". Users and
developers are audience enough.
So my vote would be to focus on users-who-want-binaries and
developers-who-want-to-roll-their-own, and stay out of the middle
ground.
If we start to make more JARs available separately, many of the
dependency issues start to go away, since you could just go to a page
and download whatever stable JARs were listed as the prerequisites.
-Ted.
