On Thu, 2010-03-11 at 13:21 -0500, Vick Khera wrote: > As a newcomer, I started by reading the wiki and following examples. > The quick-start guide failed, so I just backed out of the beta to the > released version. The wiki recommends using the beta release to > protect against on-disk format changes that may happen.
Ok, that makes sense. http://wiki.apache.org/cassandra/GettingStarted has generally targeted the current release, so a change like this wouldn't be documented there until after making it into a stable. > Is it really good to make ant necessary to use the binary > distribution? If we're going to get into this in any depth, we should probably start another thread, but as I indicated in the ticket[1], this change was introduced to solve real problems we were having with dependency management. Basically, we traded: * manual, tedious, and error prone task(s) * the legal requirement to document licensing and attribution For: * requiring network access (though I seem to be the only one that considers this a major drawback). * requiring ant to be installed * one extra step prerequisite step (invoking `ant ivy-retrieve') So what this really boils down to is a question of which is worse, the disease or the cure. Bare in mind though that despite the best of intentions, license and attribution was not being kept up with properly which results in legal risks that are unacceptable to the ASF. It's also worth pointing out that the dependency tree has seen quite a bit of churn in addition to more than doubling in size (and every indication is that this will continue in the near-term). > Might as well just stop distributing the binary if you need a > developer environment to use it anyway. Maybe we should. :) [1]: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-850 -- Eric Evans [email protected]
