On Wed, 28 Sep 2011, Rob Weir wrote:
Now that we have Maven support for the XSLT-Runner and
XSLT-Runner-Task modules, I think we're ready to look at what we want
for a release.
Since POI is the most similar project to ours, it is instructive to
look at their release:
I think Tika might be a better one to compare to. Tika is a fully maven
based project, with various dependencies and sub-projects. POI still
builds with Ant (it's fast and it works!), with a core and a few
extensions, so it may not be the best one to follow
They have a bin release and a src release, and provide each one as
tar.gz and .zip archives.
This is quite typical for Apache Java projects. We also publish jars and
poms to a maven repo so that Maven based projects can easily use the
library.
/poi-3.7/docs (a lot of doc. Not just the API doc, but a bunch of
other docs,case studies, some of it project related, but contribution
guidelines, subversion info, etc. I'm not sure why this is in the
release, and not just on the website?)
The main reason is so that when you get a download, you can get the docs
that went with it. It avoids the issue of updating the site for the new
details, and the user no longer being able to get the information as of
the time of the release they have. This may or may not matter for your
users
/poi-3.7/lib (dependency libraries, like commons-logging, junit and log4j)
/poi-3.7/ooxml-lib (another set of dependency libraries, not sure why
it is separate from the above, Maybe only needed for one of their
components)
The jars in /lib/ are always needed. The ones in /ooxml-lib/ are only
needed for the newer file formats, which not everyone wants/needs.
They're also quite a lot larger, so we didn't want to force people who
only wanted the old formats to have to take the big extra set of
dependencies. May not matter so much today, but it was a big request from
the community at the time we introduced the ooxml support.
Nick
