It was suggested on general@ that a source only release reduces the number of requirements with regards to dealing with (transitive) dependencies and NOTICE files [1]. I can't recall if this is new or not but the release guide also currently suggests them for early projects [2].
My reading is that since we would only be distributing source code, the NOTICE file should not reflect binary dependencies and would have *only* the standard Apache bit [3]. Same for LICENSE. Now it is (much) more convenient for users to have a nice binary tarball. And better for client writers to have binary releases that can be re-packaged downstream, live in maven repositories etc. However, I think at this point it is more important for the community to have a common reference point now (aka a release) than a binary release later. I strongly suspect that there is currently a splintering among pre-ASF releases, trunk, and the various 0.7 RCs. This is not healthy for the community. I'm willing to slog through the dependencies, and if I need to write code to do that (which seems like the only reasonable option to me), so be it. But I don't think we need to block everything on that unless we want to. [1] http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-kafka-dev/201112.mbox/%3CCAKTa1mhb%3DKMym9KOFDtXZHtoaMwky0Vcv-%2Bm4vB%2BR9%2BwND1PnA%40mail.gmail.com%3E [2] http://incubator.apache.org/guides/releasemanagement.html#notes-on-source-only-releases [3] http://www.apache.org/legal/src-headers.html#notice
