On 10 Mar 2004, at 19:51, Steven Noels wrote:(OT for the non-ASF folks:) You seem to suggest that inclusion of non-ASL-licensed library dependencies inside ASF distributions should be deprecated, favoring a CPAN or FreeBSD ports -like mechanism instead. This will definitely lower the ease of use for end-users, which have been complaining already that we don't ship a binary distribution of Cocoon, let alone that we would ship a download which requires them to either hunt down additional packages themselves, or have an internet connection when installing Cocoon.
... which brings me around to something I've been pondering for a while. Since Cocoon is a bit of a 'hub' in the open source world, it brings together a stack of external libraries. Including these in the core source distribution is clunky and painful for everyone. Have we considered using Maven or similar to help manage these dependancies? ....
Sounds like the way to go, intelligently downloading dependencies from some non-ASF repository should solve most, maybe all of the licensing problems, and help make Cocoon more lightweight for many uses.
IIRC last time this was discussed the debate quickly moved to a heated discussion on the relative merits of Maven and other similar tools - if we're going to discuss this again, we must be careful to focus on the goals rather than on the tools!
-Bertrand
