Ted Husted wrote:
>
> "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.
Of course we should 'let' them. We just shouldn't make that their only
option. Nothing I have talked about would make the build process
in-flexible, or impose any requirements upon other developers /
projects. I wanted to make a build.sh/bat scripts for beanutils, and
then toss the ant-1.3.jar into a commonly accessable place so others
could use it if they wish.
> If they want to get under the hood, they should be ready to get their
> hands dirty, and meet all the prerequisites.
Why do this if we don't have to? I agree that we shouldn't do things
that are harmful to the overall health or stability of a project, or the
freedom of the developers. But something simple to help a user get
started? Can't see the downside from here.
> 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.
If there is no cost, why not? Generally, our users are developers, just
developers that aren't always necessarily configured for the 'Jakarta
way'.
> 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.
Why? The following gives me the middle ground for beanutils :
cd jakarta-commons
mkdir tools
cvs add tools
cd tools
mkdir lib
cvs add lib
cd lib
cp <my ant.jar> ant-1.3.jar
cvs add ant-1.3.jar
cvs commit ant-1.3.jar
all done.
>
> 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.
Where would you keep them? <gasp> Not CVS! </gasp> Maybe we could make
a server somewhere that would accept requests from all comers, checkout
and build the required jar, and mail it to you... :)
geir
--
Geir Magnusson Jr. [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Developing for the web? See http://jakarta.apache.org/velocity/
