In a nutshell, I disagree with the decision to resolve https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-697
as Won't Fix. Here's why: One of the central motivations behind Maven was to once and for all get rid of binary dependencies in source repositories. You, the Cassandra committers operating under the Apache umbrella should have no difficulty getting those lib/*.jar dependencies into the official repository. It shouldn't take more than half an hour to "mvn deploy" a handful of jars. On that note, it should be a no-brainer to actually deploy the *Apache* Cassandra JAR to the *Apache* Maven repository. Sorry for the rant but taking shortcuts like this forces every Maven user down the stream to either do the work for you, e.g to deploy the Cassandra JAR and its dependencies to their local repository or take the very same shortcut. The Hector client, for example, has a dependency on the Thrift and Cassandra JARs and it takes the shortcut of having both JARs in the repository. If I want to use the client in my own Maven-built project, I can't do so without manually deploying those two JARs along with the Hector JAR to my local repository. To add fuel to the fire, I don't think that there is a real need for two coexisting build systems for Cassandra (I'm speaking of Ant/Ivy and Maven) but even if you decide to go with Ant/Ivy, the resulting artifacts should all be accessible in a public Maven repository. This is pretty much a convention for any OS project of Cassandra's reach and maturity. -- Hannes
