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From: Guillaume Rousse <rousse@ccr.jussieu.fr>
Organization: =?iso8859-1?q?Universit=E9=20Pierre=20&=20Marie?= Curie
To: general@xml.apache.org
Subject: Re: [3rd party jar] w3c
Date: Wed, 6 Feb 2002 11:30:25 +0100
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Ainsi parlait Shane Curcuru :
> ---- you Guillaume Rousse <rousse@ccr.jussieu.fr> wrote ----
>
> > Yes, it requires a net connection, but from
> > where did you get your initial source tarball anyway ?
>
> Well, a couple of points:
> -- The initial download requires a net connection somewhere, but many
> folks only download once and then work on that copy for a while.  I
> don't mind that, but I would mind having to wait for the net connection
> for every time I recompile something.  (While having to do this only
> the first time you build a new download is better, it's still quite
> annoying and is difficult to document).
>
> -- What about the developer who works for a larger organization who got
> the distro from some internal network at their site?  That individual
> may *never* actually have an external net connection - they may only
> work on an intranet, where some other member on the team downloaded the
> sources or distros for them to an internal server.  Don't laugh, I have
> dealt with exactly this kind of situation in the past.
I know those kind of situation, i usually donwload many things from my 
desktop at university, and work offline on my laptop. And i've been badly 
suprised by some build using network connections, for additional sources or 
for javadoc linking :-)
However, i was proposing to make it a distinct task, so checking dependencies 
could been made as a part of initial download. And a consequent README file 
would allow to check if you actually need to proceed this task.
FYIThis is also standard src rpm behaviour: you download them, and only at 
build time it will bomb you out for missing build dependencies. However, you 
can also query the rpm for checking them.

Anyway, having each used jar as an overridable property, whereas they are 
included or not, would be a big help for people wanting to build from 
external ones. Currently, we have to:
- delete all provided jars, to make sure they not interfere
- include installed one in classpath
- deal with ant complaints about missing files.

> I guess in the larger scale, this is part of a meta-issue of the
> overall usability of Apache projects for any potential user out there -
> including non-technical users.
> My preference is to try to do the little extra bit of coordination and
> work on our part to enable those folks who *don't* happen to already be
> expert developers to be able to quickly and easily use our projects.
> But that's just my perspective.  8-)
My opinion on this subject is it overcomes a single (or even a group of 
single) software project capacities, and should be delegated (at least to 
some extent) to distribution project. Thus the need to cooperate.
-- 
Guillaume Rousse <rousse@ccr.jussieu.fr>
GPG key http://lis.snv.jussieu.fr/~rousse/gpgkey.html

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