In one of the OSCON discussions, I noted the recent polite discussion
re binary jars in source releases on general@incubator. While this is
apparently tolerated (if you don't mind wearing Nomex), it's
considered a Bad Thing (TM) generally speaking. Folks suggested that
we look at how subversion handles this. In short, Subversion has a
script that downloads all of their dependencies in binary form - and
they also provide a download for the deps as a tarball.
This made me think that perhaps we should add a .gitignore entry for
.jars in deps/ (and tools/), and write a script that downloads the
specific versions of the dependencies that we need and depending on
argument, either places them in the deps/ directory or creates a
tarball. (hopefully verifying {md5|sha1}sum for each binary along the
way)
Thoughts? comments? flames?
--David
