Cocoon is now a major opensource product, and as such its user base includes more and more people that are far less technically skilled than we are. Moreover (I already mentioned this) the power of Cocoon's builtin components leads to many people using it without ever opening a Java source file.
Having to compile Cocoon by themselves will certainly refrain many of them to go further than "opening the box" : they will close it quickly and go away.
So I'm -1 for a source-only distro.
I also think a working Jetty-powered sample webapp is a must have in the distro, since most often new users start learning Cocoon by playing with the samples and modifying them.
Ok, in order to clearup the psychological bias, let's say that cocoon does *ONLY ONE* distribution. Let us ignore if this is binary or source. it's the cocoon distribution: period.
Now, this said: what different does it make if I have to do
./build.sh; ./cocoon.sh servlet
or
./cocoon.sh servlet
only to get the *exact* same result? Also, the complete build takes something like 3/5 minutes on a regular machine. If this was some three hours, then I would agree to do it once and ship the binary, but I don't see the need in this case.
NOTE that the person doesn't have to download anything, nor needs to have online access, nor needs to have the JDK installed (a regular compiler-free JVM will work too)!
The advantages are multiple:
1) bandwidth reduction (yes, this should be our concern as cocoon is getting so big)
2) unification of mindsets (everybody works on the same stuff and people scared of compiling things find out how easy it is to do it.) [this is happening a lot for MacOSX where more and more macos9 users finding out about the terminal and *liking* it!]
3) easier release process (will make it easier for having multiple release coordinators, hopefully helping producing a faster release cycle)
Thoughts?
Stefano.
