If you think that your users are not going to like "svn co" as a way to
get your software, you are free to package the stuff and release it from
where ever you want.
And, of course, you are free to avoid labs altogether and either do it
somewhere else or propose your project for incubation.
Long story short: labs is not, and will never become as long as I'm
around, a lightweight incubator.
I can't see why having releases would lead to the lab being a lightweight
incubator. I've made clear that those releases wouldn't be endorsed by the
ASF. It would just be a convenience for the project. The incubator has all
the organization, processes and infrastructure for official apache releases
and to make possible the evolution toward official apache projects. The lab
obviously wouldn't. IMHO that's where the difference lies, not in being able
to drop a zip somewhere and link to it (and technically speaking I won't be
able to release somewhere else because I won't be able to link to the
release from the lab, that could be perceived as implicit endorsement from
users).
As for being sourceforgy, it seems to me that the lab being only open to
committers somewhat protects us. I agree that we are a lot of committers
nowadays but lab projects have a lifecycle and are required to be voted in,
which also brings more structure.
Again, I think the lab is a great idea and most of the rules I've seen there
make a lot of sense and are beneficial to lab projects. But without a
release the idea is somewhat far less appealing. Committers don't have much
time, thinking that they will take a significant amount of it to checkout
labs projects, compile them and try them out on a weekly (or even monthly)
basis sounds unlikely. That could happen once in a while, but would that be
enough to make the lab appealing without any release possibility?
Matthieu
