Hi, The Derby dependency is only needed when Jackrabbit is configured to use one of the Derby persistence managers. This *is* the default configuration, but in many cases the Derby dependency is not needed.
Also, having Derby included for example in WEB-INF/lib of the Jackrabbit webapp is troublesome due to the Derby background threads making it difficult to properly un- or redeploy such webapps. A better alternative is to have the Derby as a shared container-level library (common/lib in Tomcat). For these reasons I'd like to remove the compile-scope Derby dependency from jackrabbit-core. The runnable standalone server jar would still bundle Derby to keep things as simple as possible, but for other deployments you'd need to explicitly add Derby. WDYT? BR, Jukka Zitting
