Sources in Binary Distributions

["Craig R. McClanahan" <cr...@apache.org>]

By habit (since before my time on Tomcat :-), we have shipped the source
code (although not in a directly buildable arrangement) inside the binary
distributions of Tomcat.  This is certainly nice for people that want to
look around and see how Tomcat works, but it is somewhat redundant since
we make separate source distributions (that *are* directly buildable,
because they are snapshots of the CVS repository) available anyway.

For Tomcat 4, what do folks think of omitting the sources from the binary
distribution?  This would knock the size of the binary distributions down
by around 2 megabytes (which I'm sure people would also appreciate).

Craig McClanahan

RE: Sources in Binary Distributions

[Bip Thelin <bi...@razorfish.com>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Craig R. McClanahan [mailto:craigmcc@apache.org]
> 
> [...]
> Well, "ant dist" ***is*** how binary distributions (for both the nightly
> builds and releases) are created, so this should not be too much of a
> surprise :-).

Oups, ignore my last post.

	..bip

Re: Sources in Binary Distributions

["Craig R. McClanahan" <cr...@apache.org>]

On Fri, 27 Jul 2001, Christopher Cain wrote:

> 
> On a related topic, I was a little surprised to find a source directory
> in my "dist" build.

Well, "ant dist" ***is*** how binary distributions (for both the nightly
builds and releases) are created, so this should not be too much of a
surprise :-).

Craig McClanahan

Re: Sources in Binary Distributions

[Christopher Cain <cc...@mhsoftware.com>]

"Craig R. McClanahan" wrote:
> 
> [snip]
> 
> For Tomcat 4, what do folks think of omitting the sources from the binary
> distribution?  This would knock the size of the binary distributions down
> by around 2 megabytes (which I'm sure people would also appreciate).

FWIW, I completely agree. I actually get a little irritated when I
download a package for which I specifically selected "binary" and find
source in my directory tree. It needlessly dragged out out my download
time and junks up my hard drive. The only reason I ever download
binaries is if I am not at all interested in the source for that
particular package, and I will download the source myself should I
become so. I find it cheeky to sneak it in there. Not that I ever feel
that way about Tomcat, of course ... I love you guys and all your
fancy-schmancy code =)

On a related topic, I was a little surprised to find a source directory
in my "dist" build. Again, today was my very first forray into 4.0, so I
have no historical context for the 4.0 build process. I did read
somewhere along the way that "build dist" was to produce exactly the
same layout as something else (the binary distro, perhaps, but I can't
remember), so maybe that's the reason it is historically included. But
as long as you are considering dropping the source from the binaries,
which I think is a good idea, my humble suggestion would also be to drop
it from the dist target. Again, it was an very extraneous directory for
the production system where I sent it, so I ended up manually deleting
it. Anyway, just my experience ...

- Christopher

RE: Sources in Binary Distributions

["Rob S." <rs...@home.com>]

> For Tomcat 4, what do folks think of omitting the sources from the binary
> distribution?  This would knock the size of the binary distributions down
> by around 2 megabytes (which I'm sure people would also appreciate).

...exactly why I emailed about it in the first place =)  I have an old
laptop with a paltry 2GB HD and with Windows, every OUNCE of space I can
free up is worth it.  Also, I think 3.x still includes them and I'm kind of
surprised to see "src" in there.  Whenever I want to see src, I always go to
web cvs anyways.

I think it's good to have the source for the version you're running if you
ever need to snoop around, but we could save the world some bandwidth and
time for the very few instances this occurs =)

- r

Re: Sources in Binary Distributions

[Christopher Cain <cc...@mhsoftware.com>]

Bip Thelin wrote:
> 
> ...
> And also update the build.xml to omitt the sources when compiling with
> target dist.

LOL! Idea Thief!!! ;-)

(j/k)

RE: Sources in Binary Distributions

[Bip Thelin <bi...@razorfish.com>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Craig R. McClanahan [mailto:craigmcc@apache.org]
>
>[...]
> For Tomcat 4, what do folks think of omitting the sources from the binary
> distribution?  This would knock the size of the binary distributions down
> by around 2 megabytes (which I'm sure people would also appreciate).

+1
And also update the build.xml to omitt the sources when compiling with
target dist.

	..bip