....But we have to take psychology into account. CVS scared me at first. Build scared me
too. How do we make the learning curve easier? Why loose people who don't get
past those first hurdles, when they may well be perfectly capable of working with
Cocoon, but didn't have the confidence to make those first few jumps?
A source-only distribution is not necessarily harder to use, it all depends how it is packaged and used.
IIRC a full JDK (as opposed to runtime-only) is needed to run Cocoon anyway, so compiling or not compiling does not make much difference.
A possible scenario would be:
-user installs Java Web Start
-user goes to the Cocoon download page, clicks on a JNLP link which starts a small install GUI
-install GUI helps user download the Cocoon source (maybe even specific CVS tags), asks for an installation directory, asks for the port on which to run Cocoon, starts the build and then jetty.
This is not so hard to implement and would be even easier to use than what we have now.
One small logistical problem is having a certificate in the CVS to sign the jars with for java web start. I don't know if there are ASF certificates available, but worst case we could use a self-signed one.
-Bertrand
