Stefano Mazzocchi wrote:
as a matter of fact, we don't. It's plain vanilla ant 1.5.4 and it's there only because not everybody has ant installed. Same thing for jetty, it's called "convenience" and makes it easier for users and developers to get started.
Is there a specific reason why there isn't a binary distribution?
It was a desperate temporary measure we took for several reasons:
1) There were frustrating JDK dependencies (now gone) which tripped users up at an amazing rate. We are apparently attracting more than hard core developers, to put it politely.
2) The act of adding/removing optional functionality was extremely painful for all but the most seasoned users. So, until we could get the "real blocks" moving (which we judged to be a next release goal) using the build to automate that process has helped immensely despite the initial shock of users finding that they have to build.
3) Especially because of that last point, deciding exactly what constitutes a "binary" distribution was non-trivial. In 2.2 we expect that to be a very bare-bones cocoon with easily deployed and extended add-ons.
Geoff
