Virtual artifacts have the potential to: . simplify build environments . simplify installation documentation . reduce the bar of entry for building ASF software . reduce support requests . allow meta-data to be associated with 3rd party artifacts
They are not about: . hosting 3rd party artifacts within ASF repository . circumventing licenses of 3rd party products . exposing ASF to liability So far, no one has demonstrated that virtual artifacts would expose ASF to liability - although I'm not privvy to discussions held on non-public ASF lists. -Tim > From: Noel J. Bergman [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sent: Sunday, 23 November 2003 10:41 AM > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > > Suppose ASF has the following link in the repository: > > http://repo.apache.org/sun/jndi/1.2.1/jars/jndi-1.2.1.jar > > This is a virtual artifact, not hosted at ASF. > > I do not like the idea of virtual artifacts. I think that the > meta-data for > any component that needs a foreign artifact should contain the information > needed by some tool. I don't think that we want to include foreign > components in the ASF namespace. In fact, there is a situation right now > where someone else has done that to the ASF, and we're not happy about it. > > --- Noel > >
