There has been some discussion on the Maven dev list about the Apache requirements to provide a complete source distribution with every project release. As a result all maven projects at Apache are now required to do this.
I think it's a good practice in general for maven and other open source projects because it means that your project release can be rebuilt from source (we do this a lot at Red Hat), without needing to check out from the svn tag. SCM urls can change over time if projects are moved or when there is a migration to another SCM (for example svn to git). So when the full sources are not available along with the binary release, it can sometime be difficult to rebuild the binaries from source.
I'd like to recommend that we start doing the same thing for mojo releases, but I'm not sure the best way to encourage/enforce it. As long as no one has any objections, I'd like to update the mojo release checklist [1] to include some notes and examples about including a source assembly with the project. IMO it's enough to just include the .zip file, and make other formats (tar.gz, bz2, etc) optional.
Please reply if you think this is not a good idea or have other ideas/concerns about this.
Thanks! [1]http://mojo.codehaus.org/development/performing-a-release.html --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe from this list, please visit: http://xircles.codehaus.org/manage_email
