Single or multiple tarballs?

[Todd Volkert <tv...@gmail.com>]

I had forged ahead with the single archive release format in the
assumption that it was a cleaner approach than having separate
archives.  To me, it looks cluttered to have:

* pivot-1.1-incubating.tar.gz
* pivot-1.1-incubating.tar.gz.asc
* pivot-1.1-incubating.tar.gz.md5
* pivot-1.1-incubating.tar.gz.sha
* pivot-1.1-incubating-src.tar.gz
* pivot-1.1-incubating-src.tar.gz.asc
* pivot-1.1-incubating-src.tar.gz.md5
* pivot-1.1-incubating-src.tar.gz.sha
* pivot-1.1-incubating-doc.tar.gz
* pivot-1.1-incubating-doc.tar.gz.asc
* pivot-1.1-incubating-doc.tar.gz.md5
* pivot-1.1-incubating-doc.tar.gz.sha

As opposed to just having one archive that contains doc, src, and lib
folders within it.  However, Niclas brings up the good point that the
single tarball approach could be annoying to users with slow network
connections.

Does anyone feel strongly about this?  Is it even worth voting on, or
is this a non-issue?  Note that we could possibly go with the two
tarball approach, drop the doc archive, and the user who wants local
docs could build it from src...

Thoughts?
-T

Re: Single or multiple tarballs?

[Sandro Martini <sa...@gmail.com>]

Hi to all,
if possible, I'd prefer to have a tarball for bin, and another for
sources, instead of one containing all, and for a simple reason: how
many users needs/wants sources unzipped with the binary (usually many
hundreds files and many MB of space) ? I think not many, so my
preference for a separate src.

For the documentation instead, for me it's the same, but maybe as
written over I'd put them in the src tarball if possible, or in a
separate tarball.


Looking at various Apache projects i see that the documentation is:
- ant, docs under bin
- maven, no docs under bin
- tomcat, separate docs tarball
- wicket, all in one (bin, docs, src)
- tapestry, under src tarball
- etc ...


Best regards,
Sandro

Re: Single or multiple tarballs?

[Niclas Hedhman <ni...@hedhman.org>]

On Wed, Apr 1, 2009 at 12:47 PM, Todd Volkert <tv...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Does anyone feel strongly about this?  Is it even worth voting on, or
> is this a non-issue?  Note that we could possibly go with the two
> tarball approach, drop the doc archive, and the user who wants local
> docs could build it from src...

I would stick the docs into the binary tarball, and keep sources clean
from everything that is built. Convenience in one,  correctness in the
other.


Cheers
-- 
Niclas Hedhman, Software Developer
http://www.qi4j.org - New Energy for Java

I  live here; http://tinyurl.com/2qq9er
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