On Monday, March 24, 2003, at 07:50 AM, Bertrand Delacretaz wrote:
A source-only distribution is not necessarily harder to use, it all depends how it is packaged and used.
... and documented. Most of the problems I've had with oss make-install-before-try software were related to some glitch, encountered during the make-install, that wasn't answered in the install or readme files.
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.
Seems to me the above clearly complements the source-only distribution strategy that Stefano is proposing.
Diana
