Dear Developers, In case you haven't been following our fortunes in the gene...@incubator.apache.org list, it has become clear that ManifoldCF has resurrected an old battle having to do with rules pertaining to the legality of including binaries in a source release. It is therefore my opinion that the 0.5-incubating release will not occur until we substantially rework our build process, especially where it pertains to dependencies. A short way of stating the problem is that binary dependencies can no longer be included in the source zip/tar.gz that gets voted on. A request has also been made for us to remove all previous releases that violate this principle, which is all of them. I am waiting to see how the discussion pans out before acting on this request.
Our build and release process was modeled, unfortunately, on other Apache Java projects, and these too have come under fire from the Board because the same practice has been followed, in some cases for more than a decade. I'm not sure what ManifoldCF did to become the focal point of this discussion, but there it is - and my personal opinion is that there is no chance of us releasing 0.5 without making significant changes. I've captured what I think needs to be done in CONNECTORS-437, and have been working through an ordered process of first setting up an svn-based repository for those binaries which have been patched or otherwise contain fixes not present in official released code, with a long-term goal in mind of eventually having all dependencies come from the Maven repository. This is in svn under "https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator/lcf/bin-dist";. I will also be extending the "ant download-dependencies" target to pull in ALL binaries, not just those which come with incompatible licenses. The ticket is probably incomplete; I'll be adding more stuff as I find it. Thanks, Karl
