Building projects with distributions vs JARs

[Jason van Zyl <jv...@apache.org>]

Hi,

I am ready to test building a project (turbine) with the dep and version
info found in the alexandria descriptors and I'd like to see what people
think should actually be downloaded: a JAR or the distribution that contains
the JAR.

I was originally thinking that just the JAR might be better, but I remember
Sam saying that the distribution would be better, or that the layout of the
distribution will have to be taken into consideration at some point.

For building a project maybe it doesn't really matter whether the JAR or
distribution is downloaded, but it might be better if the distribution is
downloaded 

1) The project maintainers only have to worry about making the distribution,
they won't have to copy a JAR into a repository. The distribution would be
the single source of info which brings me to my next point.

2) If a set of distributions were pulled down a simple velocity task could
be made that would generate an HTML page with references to all the API docs
stored in the distributions. Or if things were named in a standard way you
might be able to make a doc page for each project with pointers to the
license, README, install instructions, whatever. This task could be used to
make a set of documentation available on a website or a developer could
generate it on her own machine so viewing offline is convenient.

Right now I'm leaning toward pulling down the distributions and storing them
all somewhere.

Any thoughts? And how might we store them? Is just unpacking the
distribution good enough? Are there projects that always unpack to the same
directory regardless of version?

-- 

jvz.

Jason van Zyl

http://tambora.zenplex.org
http://jakarta.apache.org/turbine
http://jakarta.apache.org/velocity
http://jakarta.apache.org/alexandria
http://jakarta.apache.org/commons



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