In our 2.3.0 release, the addons package (which has annotators plus some other stuff) did a binary packaging for the annotators twice:
- Once as a Pear (at least for most of the Annotators), and - once as part of the big binary assembly that became the add-on binary package. I think it would be better to avoid this duplication, and use only the Pear as the binary form for each annotator component, and have them as individual downloads. This way, if someone wanted, say, the Dictionary Annotator, they could just get it (even from Maven - as I plan to attach the PEARs as artifacts) by itself, without needing to download lots of other binary stuff (like the Tagger project, which has giant data resources...). If we made this change, one new requirement would be that annotators would have to use pear packaging if binary distribution was wanted; one annotator that would need this change, for instance, is the BSFAnnotator. Another advantage if we did this would be we could only release Annotators which change (when we do major releases), leaving the others alone; this would reduce the "rate of change" that impose on our user community, which is a good thing I think, and seems more in alignment with the Maven way of change management of components with dependencies. Anyone else think this is a good idea? Any objections? -Marshall
