For the Maven artifact; As I mentioned, it is still an open item on
where this
should really be. On one side is the hard liners, which basically
says that
Apache is about Open Source, and only source releases should be the
ASF's
legal responsibility. Then the pragmatic bunch (majority) thinks that
binaries are absolutely a requirement, otherwise people won't use ASF's
projects, and we need a legal framework (procedures, recommendations,
archiving, ++) for binaries that is as good as the source ones. That is
essentially agreed upon for some time already. In this context, a binary
release refers to the produced artifacts wrapped in a tarball with
LICENSE/NOTICE and docs.
Recently (a year or two) there are discussions on how should Maven
artifacts
be handled. Now you can start splitting the binary bunch in smaller
undefinable camps.
There are three main issues; The license requirements, the archiving
requirements and the 'oversight' requirements.
For long, Maven artifacts were not official, but recently there is
a /dist/maven-repository and according to "infrastructure team"
everything
under /dist is official and archived. Not sure whether this is still
true,
since /dist/maven-repository redirects to
http://people.apache.org/repo/m2-ibiblio-rsync-repository/, which is the
upload area, but I think infra is now archiving this.
"Oversight" is slightly diffuse, but refers to the "many eyeballs"
concept,
and is essentially a human process. Maven makes it very easy to make
the "release" if it wasn't for the oversight issue. And many people has
requested Maven community to directly support the ASF manual
processes in the
release process in Maven, including call for VOTE, providing
references to
the PMC vote, and so on. That is still far away.
License requirements is mostly about the many licenses saying "prominent
place" to refer to where the license must be. IMHO, it should be root
folder
of artifact. But I think people has objected due to the nature of
Maven jars
are active artifacts, and should not be polluted by this. META-INF is
currently the minimum requirement, and I am still not sure whether Maven
artifacts are official release artifacts of ASF.
I hope that is enough preaching in one go.
Cheers
Niclas
